Ram drives are making a comeback :)
Time to dust off my DDRDrive
Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
131–140 of 240 posts
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#132Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#133At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid…
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#134Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#135At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.
If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.
this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature”
it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types.
it’s all uninformed fear mongering
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#136[flagged]
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#137With regards to RAM price I never understood the following: A 16GB RAM stick has 16*8=128 billion bits, with 1 transistor per bit, thats still 128B, yet its supposed to cost like $60 before the price hikes? In contrast, a 5090 GPU was $2000 (true it has RAM, but you're paying for the GPU ASIC really, I guess the rest of the GPU was less than $500), it had 93B transistors. GPU transistors are smaller due to the more a…
Why would you expect smaller transistors to be cheaper?
Because you are paying for silicon, and processes, not transistors. Wafers have a certain cost, and litographic processes can illuminate a certain X mm2 of dies in an hour. If a transistor gets smaller, more of them fit in a certain area.
Granted the machines that make them become more expensive, but that's capital expenditure, which gets amortized as time goes on.
So there are two forces here working against each other.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#138At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid…
that's only 133-times as much CPU power
akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.
Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a pretty nitpicking reason to say it has not aged well. Hamlet doesn’t have cell phones yet I think it’s an excellent play. Even though a quick FaceTime would’ve averted a tragedy.
So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.
You still see this in many newer movies. If they are set in the present step one is "oh no, we have no cell service". There are so many movies and TV shows where the plot doesn't work if you have cell service or internet access.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid…
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power. Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than th…
I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.