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Making RAM at Home [video]

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Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#151

Post by tombert »

RobotToaster wrote: post #38
jukkan wrote: post #25

"There is no DownloadMoreRAM, it's just some guy in a backyard shed." https://downloadmoreram.com/

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

I've thought about doing stuff like that (or mounting S3), but I've never done it because I figured that the latency would be enormous and it would be too slow to actually be useful.

That said, I could actually kind of see it being useful for stuff that doesn't need to be super fast but does allocate a lot of RAM (though I'm drawing a blank on what that would be at the moment).

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#152

Post by tesseract »

generuso wrote: post #65
fastjack42 wrote: post #52

Technologies that were considered "high-tech" 20-30 years ago are now accessible to regular people. Making DRAM. I remember a video recently of a guy making his own floppy disks. Next I expect people to manufacture integrated circuits that have been discontinued. Like the Z80

It is not really feasible to fabricate usable integrated circuits at home. There is a huge difference between a one off demonstration of a principle that "sort of works", and perfecting the process to the point that it produces finished parts that can be relied on. This guy is not exactly a regular person. He is a pretty unique case of a talented semiconductor engineer who has a home lab for side hassles. It is not a…

"Side hassles"... hahaha. Love it.

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#153

Post by fancyfredbot »

INTPenis wrote: post #70
apatheticonion wrote: post #32

I'm not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol

Jokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business? I'd pay less for RAM that wasn't "certified" in some official way, at least it works.

He's producing semiconductors with a 1000nm (one micron) feature size. This kind of tech was cutting edge in the mid 80s. You might be able to produce a 32KB memory chip with it.

It would be difficult to break into the RAM business with that sort of product as most of the demand these days is for higher capacities.

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#154

Post by terlisimo »

saganus wrote: post #12
LPisGood wrote: post #5

I saw this video yesterday and considered posting it, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN. This channel has another video where it shows how the clean room lab is created starting from a basic backyard shed, and that was truly astounding. The positive pressure to keep the number of particles low in someone’s backyard is almost mystical to me.

If you haven't seen this one, I highly recommend it: Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&t=2070s It's quite old but I think there is no modern version of it. I've tried posting to HN a few times but it hasn't gained traction for some reason, but I find it absolutely mind blowing.

The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything.

Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since.

Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKtxx9TnH76RYHY7L1YzE...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#155

Post by stronglikedan »

LPisGood wrote: post #5

I saw this video yesterday and considered posting it, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN. This channel has another video where it shows how the clean room lab is created starting from a basic backyard shed, and that was truly astounding. The positive pressure to keep the number of particles low in someone’s backyard is almost mystical to me.

> but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN

why even allow the cognitive overhead to worry about such a thing? it's not for you to decide anyway - let the users decide using the voting system that's built to task

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#157

Post by nebula8804 »

INTPenis wrote: post #78
Dylan16807 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to set up a manufacturing process for basically anything if you can spend 100x per unit compared to the big optimized factories and you don't mind the product being a lot slower. The clean room isn't the hard part about being competitive. It's using advanced lithography to cram billions of cells into a single chip. If you want make DDR2 chips on a 90 nanometer process, that is accessible to a whole l…

Nobody will buy the product? I'm an infrastructure architect and work with health care, local tax agency, they're all getting 25-30% inflated bills now for new hardware. And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM? I'd say if people aren't desperate already, they're about to be.

In one of Dwarkesh's interviews, he mentioned that China is trying to replicate the entire stack. Ironically now that they have mastered all pieces of the stack for older nodes, they actually have an advantage in a collapse scenario. The US does not appear to have the ability to do all steps in the stack for any node. They still rely on other western countries that could go offline. China despite being behind does at least have top to bottom capability for older nodes. Combine that with their rock bottom electricity prices and they have a unique card that they can play.

Just imagine if electricity costs were trending towards 0. Instead of e-waste run all those machines till the chips burn out.

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#158

Post by jerf »

tombert wrote: post #151
RobotToaster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

I've thought about doing stuff like that (or mounting S3), but I've never done it because I figured that the latency would be enormous and it would be too slow to actually be useful. That said, I could actually kind of see it being useful for stuff that doesn't need to be super fast but does allocate a lot of RAM (though I'm drawing a blank on what that would be at the moment).

Enormous latency is all relative. A network drive on a local network holding a swap file would still outperform some number of computers I've owned that put their swap on much, much slower hard drives of their time. Of course, nobody was trying to swap two gigabytes to these drives as that would have been 10 times their capacity....

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#159

Post by abdullahkhalids »

utopiah wrote: post #48
dlcarrier wrote: post #3

This guy is proof that newcomers to YouTube can still succeed, if they find the right niche.

Is it? Looks like this video is "locked" on Patreon requiring "this post and more exclusive work. Join for $10/month" yet got, as of now, 329 611 views ... so are they just making $3M/month or is it not really working?

You can go to their Patreon and see that they are making CAD545/month [1]

[1] https://www.patreon.com/cw/DrSemiconductor

Re: Making RAM at Home [video]

#160

Post by fragmede »

i_think_so wrote: post #61
RobotToaster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

This is the most pathological technology I have heard of in a long time and I am not even going to apologize for upvoting and telling other people about the evil genius I found on the internet today.

icymi https://scp-iota.github.io/software/2025/06/16/download-ram-...

tldr it's not theorical, some madman actually did that!

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