251–260 of 355 posts
We can't get any new chips. At all. We can't launch our new product because nobody could afford the memory even if we could get some.
Incredible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: You can't just get into RAM manufacturing overnight whenever you feel like it, like you're building washing machines. You need a lot more than just ASML machines, you need the supply chain, the IP, the experienced professionals with know-how, the education system, the energy, the right regulations, etc. The EU exited the RAM manufacturing business a long time ago…
> nobody can guarantee it won't be again I hope we (Europe) can try some things even when they are not guaranteed to succeed and generate huge profits. Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it. The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
If EU hopes were cookies, I would have died of obesity 100 times over. EU is bad at learning from its own mistakes and being proactive on rapid changes on the world stage, that's why it's share of global GDP has dropped by half in 20 years. EU is always reactive and then only when it's far too late and its actions are always limp-dicked("we are monitoring the situation"). See the rise of US tech, Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, rise of Chinese EVs, etc
>Otherwise we are toast, though it might take some time to realise it.
We already are toast for the long run, we just ignore it via printing more money and going into more debt, while kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with the fallout. EU's biggest economies are working around the clock on how to fund the ever growing pension and welfare deficits, how to beat Russia, and how to stop people from voting right wing, not on how to claw back and on-shore cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing.
>The concept of trying not-guaranteed things should not be so alien here on news.ycombinator.com I would think.
Yeah but someone still needs to pay for that and take a risk. And EU investors don't like risking billions of their money to try out new things that are in competition with Asia on manufacturing because we cannot compete there. Labor costs too high, regulations too high, energy costs too high, environmentalism too high, we miss critical know-how. That's why nobody is investing in EU fabs and instead in other things that guarantee higher returns like services, pharma and weapons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why has there not been a slight paradigm shift in modern system programming languages to expose more control over the caches?
Same as the failure of Itanium VLIW instructions: you don't actually want to force the decision of what is in the cache back to compile time, when the relevant information is better available at runtime. Also, additional information on instructions costs instruction bandwidth and I-cache.
That is very context-dependent. In high-performance code having explicit control over caches can be very beneficial. CUDA and similar give you that ability and it is used extensively.
Now, for general "I wrote some code and want the hardware to run it fast with little effort from my side", I agree that transparent caches are the way.
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> AI demand isn't going away. I'm not sure about that. When was the last time you have used Copilot prompt in Run dialog or Notepad?
About 10 minutes ago in Emacs.
Now try to really sincerely use copilot prompt in the Run dialog.
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
Having your own chips is a national security issue. Spreading out fabs across the world is a global resilience issue.
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It's not just that it's compressed - the OS is also intelligently handling which memory should be on hardware vs. virtual. Effectively a lot of the memory concerns have been offloaded to the OS and the VM where one exists.
Isn't that literally every modern OS, always, unless you tell it to act differently?
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
I've actively started to use outlook and teams through chrome to free up some of my ram, easily saves 3-4gb. It's gotten ridiculous how much ram basic tools are using, leaving nothing for doing actually real work
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same as the failure of Itanium VLIW instructions: you don't actually want to force the decision of what is in the cache back to compile time, when the relevant information is better available at runtime. Also, additional information on instructions costs instruction bandwidth and I-cache.
> you don't actually want to force the decision of what is in the cache back to compile time, when the relevant information is better available at runtime That is very context-dependent. In high-performance code having explicit control over caches can be very beneficial. CUDA and similar give you that ability and it is used extensively. Now, for general "I wrote some code and want the hardware to run it fast with lit…
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
As 'just' a user in the 1990s and MS-DOS, fiddling with QEMM was a bit of a craft to get what you wanted to run in the memory you had.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
(Also, DESQview was awesome.)