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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

#211

Post by philsnow »

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.

I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use gadzorp.

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

#212

Post by fc417fc802 »

mrweasel wrote: post #139
craftkiller wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lack of effort on the part of writers really ruins my enjoyment. Yes I thought I saw a suspicious person down a dark alley so I will silently separate from my group to go investigate on my own oh no who could possibly have foreseen this murder happening?

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

#213

Post by fc417fc802 »

mrob wrote: post #166
gchamonlive wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).

Off topic nit but that's not slang rather it's an example of conflicting technical jargon with an added helping of religious zealotry.

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

#214

Post by fc417fc802 »

astrange wrote: post #194
aaroninsf wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You'd be stuck on how to update "the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel". Was never sure if that meant a starry sky or a bright blue one.

Does that not refer to a complete and heavy overcast? A uniform gray from one horizon to the other without even a hint of where along its arc the sun might be.

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

#215

Post by m463 »

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.

It's funny that some of the more hand-wavy books are closer to what is happening.

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

#216

Post by fc417fc802 »

jayd16 wrote: post #124
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…

Nvme drives already max out the 4x pcie lanes they get. You'd basically need to use the GPU slot to do better and even then you could do it with SSDs. M.2 break out cards are pretty common.

However unless we're taking 3DXpoint which was discontinued flash wears out. But yeah sticking an old optane nvme on a breakout card accomplishes much the same thing.

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

#217

Post by fc417fc802 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60
amelius wrote: post #46

In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way.

> In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way. China is desperate to sell anything to... everyone. If there's a market, they'll eventually be there to fill it. It took them decades for cars, but now they did it. For RAM, CXMT went from 20 000 wafers per month to... 240 000 wafers per month in something like two years. And they're extending capacity massively now.…

> At some point they'll probably even come with GPUs that ...

I'd already like to play with the huawei card but everything is so overpriced at present and I don't think they sell those on the consumer market to begin with.

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

#218

Post by fc417fc802 »

torginus wrote: post #10

With 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…

Consider that the R&D cost of the GPU (>>> RAM) must be amortized across total units sold (<<< RAM).

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

#219

Post by disillusioned »

satnhak wrote: post #151
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 saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.

Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...

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

#220

Post by joerawr »

deltoidmaximus wrote: post #103
kjs3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair take and likely the answer. I would counter tho that 1) this isn't the first time there's been a memory price/supply crunch, and "I've got a drawer full of last gen memory I can't use" is kinduva IT cliche, and 2) 'more memory' has always been a pain point, especially with industry practices like chipsets only supporting relatively small physical memory relative to address space (e.g. all those Intel LG…

I think these products were always niche for the reasons parent suggested, I recall their price and max capacity being unappealing when I was looking to make use of a drawer full of obsolete RAM. But since there were several iterations from a few companies they must have sold well enough to justify their development. They seemed to stop making them altogether around when SSDs came out which probably shrunk the market…

I think SSDs are the answer here. You'll get more space out of a several generation old SSD, and you still stuck to the PCI speeds so performance isn't going to be much different vs a card with DDR2 or 3 on it. (performance estimates are guess-timization, not calculations)
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