31–40 of 69 posts
Here I was, hoping for ternary RAM: 1/0/-1. Didn't Burroughs field a ternary machine, once?
Could we have decimal RAM? (thinking emoji)
Forgive me for being an old guy, but how would that facilitate emoji?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
24GB and 48GB DIMMs are useful, and that's what this is about-- allowing non-power-of-2 sizes (in this case, 3x a power-of-2 is now allowed). This has the potential to noticeably reduce costs in many cases.
Well yeah but it's not interesting . It's like saying there's a whole new kind of tire - that is 13.5" wide unlike the 13" tires we're used to. Useful? Yes. interesting? No.
It was never worth it to go to the halfway points before. Slower progress in RAM (and a higher proportion of large system cost being RAM) makes it more worthwhile to fine tune this. I think it's interesting because it's yet another symptom that we're just not getting more density of memories-- now it's justified for memory controllers to be slightly fancier to deal with this.
I wish I could have more readily built a 96GB system instead of the 128GB one that I just did. I wanted overkill (more than 64GB), but I didn't need 2x overkill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can’t you use ternary internally but exposed binary to the system?
That's what PAM-4 signaling does. Quaternary signals can be easily broken up to binary ones on the other end because the bits divide cleanly. For the same reason why hexadecimal encodes binary very well. Signalling systems that don't divide cleanly into a number of bits are more complicated to work with; you need to group bits together into another group of terts[0] and assign states to each. It's less like "picking…
Can't wait to get my 1TB RAM that's actually only 931GB
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could we have decimal RAM? (thinking emoji)
Sure, many early computer architectures were built this way. Forgive me for being an old guy, but how would that facilitate emoji? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer
His message facilitated the emoji because he has not fully thought out what decimal ram would entail before sending his post.
This is a short article about allowing RAM sizes that aren't powers of 2, like 24 GB or 48 GB instead of just the steps 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB. I initially thought this was going to be about using multiple states on the data pins to encode more bits per clock.
GDDR6X uses PAM-4 - I think it's the first memory technology to do so.
> Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4-level (PAM4) is a multilevel signal modulation format used to transmit signal. Each signal level can represent 2 bits of logic information.
> NRZ
> Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ), also called Pulse Amplitude Modulation 2-level, is a binary code using low and high signal levels to represent the 1/0 information of a digital logic signal. NRZ can only transmit 1 bit, i.e. a 0 or 1, of information per signal symbol period.
How is PAM4 not just 2 "NRZ"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yeah but it's not interesting . It's like saying there's a whole new kind of tire - that is 13.5" wide unlike the 13" tires we're used to. Useful? Yes. interesting? No.
What's interesting is subjective. It was never worth it to go to the halfway points before. Slower progress in RAM (and a higher proportion of large system cost being RAM) makes it more worthwhile to fine tune this. I think it's interesting because it's yet another symptom that we're just not getting more density of memories-- now it's justified for memory controllers to be slightly fancier to deal with this. I wish…
And we had triple channel memory before, which eats of most of the novelty.
> I wish I could have more readily built a 96GB system instead of the 128GB one that I just did.
Couldn't you have put one 32GB and one 16GB module in each channel?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GDDR6X uses PAM-4 - I think it's the first memory technology to do so.
> PAM-4 > Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4-level (PAM4) is a multilevel signal modulation format used to transmit signal. Each signal level can represent 2 bits of logic information. > NRZ > Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ), also called Pulse Amplitude Modulation 2-level, is a binary code using low and high signal levels to represent the 1/0 information of a digital logic signal. NRZ can only transmit 1 bit, i.e. a 0 or 1, of in…
Because it's on one wire. (Or one wire pair for differential systems.)
Non-binary? Enough with this LGBTQRSTUV propaganda! :) Downvoting avalanche in 3...2..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, many early computer architectures were built this way. Forgive me for being an old guy, but how would that facilitate emoji? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer
Putting a thinking emoji at the end of a message signifies that you are proposing an idea that you are still thinking about. His message facilitated the emoji because he has not fully thought out what decimal ram would entail before sending his post.
More. Coffee. Required.