Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

Post by philipallstar » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:20 AM UTC

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…

Post by teddyh » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #190

teddyh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regardi…

Post by justaman123 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #164

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.

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 d…

Post by grantcas » Sat, Jul 11, 2026, 5:35 AM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #88

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.

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.

Post by soiltype » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

nullstyle wrote: post #152

soiltype wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't call that commenter an LLM, despite what I'd consider an embarrasing lack of mental model of what it means for a speculative fiction novel to age poorly. Who am I bigoted against?

so we're on the same page, here's how I read your comment: "This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh." "I don't want to assumr you're an LLM" "perhaps we can blame morning grogginess." <-- or it's an honestly held opinion expressed earnestly, and you did nothing to explain why you disagree, hence me calling your post casual bigotry