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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

#221

Post by downrightmike »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #63

It will be interesting to see what happens to the consumer electronics market the next few years. Companies are right now gambling that consumers will pay extra because of RAM shortages. I suspect with the cost of everything else rising as well, a large portion of consumers (remember, HN, not everyone makes tech money) will just not be buying new devices for a bit.

OS makers are going to have to support older hardware longer. Win10 is already pushed out another year because MSFT tried to force new hardware for Win11.

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

#222

Post by _carbyau_ »

ColdStream wrote: post #195
eightysixfour wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the th…

Yesterday I had to setup a rig for a massive down load that was larger than any spare SSD I had laying around, so I got a 2TB HDD out of an old PVR and turned it into the main drive for an old Optiplex I have. I had forgotten just how slow spinning disks are. The delay on everything is significant. Even just opening the file manager has a few second delay, Firefox took something like 15+ seconds to load in once it lo…

> you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.

When I hit occasional delays - like opening a Windows Start menu or File Explorer - I still find myself straining my ears to hear that, despite no mechanical drives in use...

Now it's all calls to the internet.

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

#223

Post by pjc50 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #179
pjc50 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the paper: "Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memo…

> recycle pls > not like that this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process

What do you mean by "not like that"?

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

#224

Post by yieldcrv »

pjc50 wrote: post #223
yieldcrv wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> recycle pls > not like that this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process

What do you mean by "not like that"?

The RAM has been recycled but it has worse emissions than throwing it away and using newer RAM

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

#225

Post by thewhitetulip »

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.

Since AI generated code is everywhere, most people don't read code anymore. Forget about hyper optimization

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

#227

Post by bcraven »

paulddraper wrote: post #203
ColdStream wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Austin Powers hung a lampshade on that very effectively:

Dr. Evil: Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me

[emphasis]

Dr. Evil: one hundred billion dollars.

The President: [bursts with laughter] Dr. Evil, this is 1969! That amount of money doesn't even exist.

[laughing]

The President: That's like saying, [with changed voice]

The President: "I want a kajillion bajillion dollars."

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

#228

Post by ssl-3 »

lizknope wrote: post #75
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…

30 years ago I remember cards like this to convert 4 30-pin SIMM modules to fit in a 72-pin SIMM slot. https://www.ebay.com/itm/383521792853

I used to use 4 of those with that same branding, Simmverter, on my first Pentium system.

There were 4 variations of the ones I had, for each combination of Tall/Short and Forward/Backward. This way, 4 such adapters could be nestled together in a single set of 4 72-pin sockets without physical interference.

Each one accepted 4 30-pin SIMMs, for a total of 16 per 4-slot system.

It was not amusing trying to get all 16 SIMMs to work correctly at the same time, but it was inexpensive to get spares and I eventually got better at being deterministic about which module to swap out to attempt to improve reliability.

(Things got a lot better when sticks of 72-pin EDO became cheaper.)

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

#229

Post by rldjbpin »

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.

as memory cycle goes, my money is on the eventual oversupply, and somehow websites will take gigabytes per tab in the end!

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

#230

Post by rldjbpin »

the title is doing the heavy lifting here. the paper discusses how they apply an existing standard (CXL), to provide an intermediate memory tier in a niche use case:

> Each MemServer combines 768 GB of DDR5 memory alongside 256 GB of DDR4 connected through Vistara ASICs.

while the ratio above would be nice the other way around, this approach surely adds enough latency to make it comparable to intel optane than system memory at face value.

this should not take away ddr4 supply for those who would like to run it at home.

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