The impressive part is not really reusing old RAM, its making the economics work despite the extra chip, software support and operational complexity
Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
161–170 of 240 posts
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#162At 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 funny part is that a 1000x increase in RAM somehow doesn't make a modern computer feel 1000x more luxurious
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#163I have always wondered why there was never a big market[1] for "cheap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e card you can stick a boatload of your old/surplus/n-generation old simms/dimms on and use as swap/slow memory/ram disk/etc". It's rare you can populate a motherboard with a full address space full of 'new' memory, and you can teach kernels to prefer some memory to others because of speed[2], so it seems like a no-brainer. I seem to…
Funny how the idea only seems to become practical once you have a literal warehouse problem worth of old RAM
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#164At 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.
Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?"
The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#165At 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.
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.
Here’s another fun nitpick from Neuromancer. The opening line says the sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel, which in Gibson’s day would have been analog static that looks like a messy grey from across the room.
But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#166At 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.
Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on? What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.
"High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compression algorithm necessarily increases the size of some inputs (pigeonhole principle). It's much simpler to assume that "M" is slang for some bigger unit.
We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ot…
You are not paying for silicon, lol. The cost of a chip is many, many orders of magnitude more than the raw material cost.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#168Oh good, so now the prices of used RAM can go through the roof, too.
Man, I hope the price of a PC goes back to being equivalent to a car. So many monetization opportunities there.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#169[dead]
Yeah seriously. Thanks for ruining everything I love.
Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
#170It makes me happy hearing that Meta has been relegated to sloppy seconds.