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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

theregister.com

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Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#151

Post by satnhak »

ecshafer wrote: post #88
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At 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.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#152

Post by nullstyle »

soiltype wrote: post #147
nullstyle wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, we're talking shit about people who express their bigotry with anticlanker sentiment, calling humans (whom they disagree with) llms.

I didn't call that commenter an LLM, despite what I'd consider an embarrasing lack of mental model of what it means for a speculative fiction novel to age poorly. Who am I bigoted against?

so we're on the same page, here's how I read your comment:

"This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh." "I don't want to assumr you're an LLM" "perhaps we can blame morning grogginess." <-- or it's an honestly held opinion expressed earnestly, and you did nothing to explain why you disagree, hence me calling your post casual bigotry

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#153

Post by goodmythical »

neonmagenta wrote: post #144
ecshafer wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.

To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#154

Post by msie »

moomoo11 wrote: post #135
mNovak wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Then you should have a problem with science-fiction in general.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#155

Post by moomoo11 »

rf15 wrote: post #143
moomoo11 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's certainly Literature. Shouldn't the quotes be more like '"cyber"punk literature', considering your complaint?

the games are more interesting imo. like deus ex or even cyberpunk 2077

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#156

Post by rpcope1 »

Aurornis wrote: post #45
jzb wrote: post #8

It’d be nice if there were a consumer version of this. I have plenty of old RAM.

Adding the RAM to the system this way isn’t exactly like expanding the main system RAM. The RAM is connected over a PCIe type link so it doesn’t behave like the primary RAM. It’s better for server farms where engineers can customize and tune for an architecture like this. There have been some cards that use RAM as a storage device. They were never popular because having to set it up as a disk had very limited use cas…

To someone not familiar with CXL that still gives the wrong impression. As far as I have seen, CXL is supposed to be cache coherent, and should require less invasive rework (if any at all) of applications to take advantage of it; that's part of the enablement of memory disaggregation that CXL is pushing towards (similar to the storage disaggregation push a decade or so ago).

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#157

Post by martinald »

pedrocr wrote: post #92
jonathanlydall wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#158

Post by refulgentis »

ecshafer wrote: post #88
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At 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.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#159

Post by brnt »

ecshafer wrote: post #88
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

At 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.

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.
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