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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

#201

Post by blacksmith_tb »

snowwrestler wrote: post #165
fredsmith219 wrote: post #102

Earlier 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.

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 diff…

Give it a generation, and readers will ask "what was a TV?" and/or "what is a channel?"

For us though, it's an evocative phrase - right place, right time.

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

#202

Post by dang »

Url changed from https://www.networkworld.com/article/4192827/meta-reuses-old..., which points to this. (I've linked to the paper in the toptext as well.)

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#203

Post by paulddraper »

ColdStream wrote: post #197
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.

Side note. It is sort of the unwritten rule in TV and Film. Don't highlight technology unless absolutely necessary. it can age it considerably. A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.

Same with monetary amounts.

Movies in 1950s: "For this heist you will receive a fantastical sum of $100,000."

Nowadays: "$100,000 is a mediocre downpayment in the suburbs."

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

#204

Post by bevr1337 »

matt_heimer wrote: post #62
kjs3 wrote: post #44

I 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…

Not exactly the same but I'm building a NAS box with old parts. Most of my spare RAM sticks are laptop DDR4 SODIMMs. There are SODIMM -> desktop DIMM adapters... it did not go well. The system would boot 1 out of 5 times. No adjustment of memory speed settings would make the system stable.

What board are you using that supports SODIMM? I’ve got 64GB I want to put in a workstation but I’m not finding the right solution.

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

#205

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

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…

Star Trek used the fictional "gigaquad" unit of computer data storage, and conveniently deliberately avoided defining how many bits the base unit of a "quad" is, so they never would get embarrassed if such an amount of storage became commonplace nowadays.

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

#206

Post by varispeed »

rock_artist wrote: post #64
egorfine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> suddenly single channel is 'ok' Single channel RAM surely beats any disk-based swap.

of course, but I was under the impression the real shortage is RAM mostly.

If you don't have RAM you swap, so it is still better to at least ensure swap is a little bit faster.

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

#207

Post by tenarchits »

overfeed wrote: post #182
BrtByte wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OTOH, MacOS before preemptive multitasking had incredible UI latency. It felt like the UI responded before you finished clicking the mouse.

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

#208

Post by bluedino »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #89
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.

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…

> 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-tier at the time

I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine.

For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory.

That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web development, edit video, play games, Photoshop, IRC, type papers...

https://books.google.com/books?id=mi_RGvUW6eQC&pg=PA108-IA3&...

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

#209

Post by saratogacx »

bluedino wrote: post #208
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…

> 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-tier at the time I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine. For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory. That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web developm…

128MB ram... Your hard disk could be upgraded to 12.8GB of total space for an extra $50.

Also, you get this _sweet_ 8MB nVidia 3d graphics card!

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

#210

Post by Polizeiposaune »

bluedino wrote: post #208
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…

> 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-tier at the time I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine. For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory. That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web developm…

128MB of memory, not 128GB.
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