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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

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

#181

Post by overfeed »

GuB-42 wrote: post #178
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

What is the issue? It is fiction, it doesn't pretend to represent reality in any way. It is more about badass cyborgs than it is about fear mongering. But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere nea…

GP sounds like someone complaining about gore/horror being written and filmed by people who never studied anatomy/physiology or sliced open cadavers. Accuracy is not the point of body horror, and fixating on it misses the point of the genre while patting oneself on the back. Same goes for Sociologists/romance novels and infosec folk/hacking scenes: remove your professional hat and enjoy the art for the fiction it is.

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

#182

Post by overfeed »

BrtByte wrote: post #162
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 funny part is that a 1000x increase in RAM somehow doesn't make a modern computer feel 1000x more luxurious

When was the last time you used a vintage computer? I couldn't believe how long people had to wait for the start-up (and shutdown) processes; and there was no hibernation! (Windows 9x/System 7.x). Modern instant-on functionality is 1,000,000 times better than that

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

#183

Post by Aurornis »

rpcope1 wrote: post #156
Aurornis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

True, but it’s still another level of NUMA with lower throughput and higher latency. In consumer boards with limited extra high speed lanes it could be a lot slower than main DDR5 RAM. Wouldn’t be fun to have your game or app run a lot slower if it happened to be loaded into the wrong part of memory.

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

#184

Post by teddyh »

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.

In early computing history, the unit of memory was not established yet, and different hardware architectures had different word sizes, not even necessarily evently divisible by 8. And the memory sizes of these machines used to be expressed using the naitive word size. Like “this machine has 8 kilowords of core”. Therefore, when I encounter an anachronistic memory size in old fiction, I just assume that I just don’t know the word size they are using.

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

#185

Post by overfeed »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #23
rock_artist wrote: post #3

The interesting part of this "RAM crisis" is similar to other fields where a problem results multiple parties looking for alternative solutions. This yields for exciting ideas or workarounds that might result a post-crisis memory boom (hopefully) also for local machines. 1. Lowest, Apple is evaluating new Chinese manufacturer which means change of supply demand if indeed it has reasonable QA. ( https://www.ft.com/con…

I would love it if we started designing software with hardware constraints in mind again.

Consumer hardware costs are external. We are in the era of ignoring externalized costs, for example, Windows 11 hardware requirements, social media harm, and mainstreaming of gambling. Maybe the pendulum will swing back in the future, but today, line-going-up is the prime directive.

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

#186

Post by sublinear »

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.

It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.

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

#187

Post by netburst »

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.

3MB of "hot" RAM, stored in a cryogenic flask - a cold boot attack. He isn't selling RAM, he's selling data.

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

#188

Post by snowwrestler »

aaroninsf wrote: post #176
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.

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever. As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens i…

And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book.

Put me on team “don’t update the text.”

Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree.

So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.

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

#189

Post by lowbloodsugar »

palmotea wrote: post #168

Oh 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.

It already is. Used 5yo DDR4 is currently priced more than it did new 5yrs ago.

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

#190

Post by walrus01 »

teddyh wrote: post #184
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.

In early computing history, the unit of memory was not established yet, and different hardware architectures had different word sizes , not even necessarily evently divisible by 8. And the memory sizes of these machines used to be expressed using the naitive word size. Like “this machine has 8 kilowords of core”. Therefore, when I encounter an anachronistic memory size in old fiction, I just assume that I just don’t…

Gibson was also not a microcomputer enthusiast at the time he wrote the book, and didn't know much about the inner workings of PCs that ordinary people could afford with a regular amount of money in the late 70s/early 80s. As I recall he said he wrote the book on a typewriter. He's also on record as saying that the first half of the sequel in the series (Count Zero) was also written on a typewriter.

edit: But regarding your specific comment, it's true that memory size wasn't totally consistent in how it was described or marketed. But in terms of computers that you could purchase and fit in your house, if you look at things similar to Byte magazine from 1982, 1984 or whatever, it was pretty consistent that desktop microcomputers were specified in multiples of KB of RAM like a 64KB or 128KB commodore (or at the very low end 16KB or 32KB for something you would attach to your TV), or IBM PC/Clone that would ship with 512KB or 640KB or 1MB of RAM, and the more expensive ones having multiples of 1MB, 2MB, etc.

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