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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#461

Post by AnthonyMouse »

neutronicus wrote: post #452
throwaway2037 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they have done pretty well for 20 years of planning. Google tells me that AWS us-east-1 region (Northern Virginia) was started in 2006! EDIT The opening paragraph: > State regulators’ review of the controversial power line proposed to stretch across three rural Maryland counties will extend to at least February 2027, officials announced Thursday, a timeline that prevents developers from meeting the grid operato…

Sure, just pointing to some news coverage in which grid operators allege that the grid is stressed in the DMV area.

The grid is constantly "stressed" everywhere, because they're designed to be. You don't build five times as much capacity as you need at huge expense for no reason, you design the thing to have only slightly more capacity than you expect to need.

If demand increases you have to build more generation and power lines etc. This is not a problem but for NIMBYs, it's just the logical consequence. If the local population increases and you don't have enough grocery stores you don't say "grocery stores are stressed" and regard it as an insurmountable problem, people just open more of them.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#462

Post by pron »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #456
pron wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> increasing cache locality is orthogonal to how much RAM an app is using. It just lets the CPU get cache hits more often, so it only relates to throughout. Cache misses mean CPU stalls, which mean wasted CPU (i.e. the CPU accomplises less than it could have in some amount of time). > In the case of Electron apps, they use a lot of RAM and that's not to spare the CPU The question isn't why apps use a lot of RAM, but…

> Cache misses mean CPU stalls, which mean wasted CPU (i.e. the CPU accomplises less than it could have in some amount of time). Yeah, I was saying CPU cache hits would result in better performance. The creator of Zig has argued that the easiest way to improve cache locality is by having smaller working sets of memory to begin with. No, it's not a given this will always work in every case. You can reduce working memo…

> But in a general sense, I understand why he argues for it.

Andrew is not wrong, but he's talking about optimisations with relatively little impact compared to others and is addressing people who already write software that's otherwise optimised. More concretely, keeping data packed tighter and reducing RAM footprint are not the same. The former does help CPU utilisation but doesn't make as big of an impact on the latter as things that are detrimental to the CPU (such as switching from moving collectors to malloc/free).

> Why do you think most cases wouldn't benefit from this?

The context to which "this" is referring to was "Reducing your RAM consumption is not the best approach to reducing your RAM throughput is my point." For data-packing, Andy Kelley style, to reduce the RAM bandwidth, the access patterns must be very regular, such as processing some large data structure in bulk (where prefetching helps). This is something you could see in batch applications (such as compilers), but not in most programs, which are interactive. If your data access patterns are random, packing it more tightly will not significantly reduce your RAM bandwidth.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#464

Post by platevoltage »

mistyvales wrote: post #242
platevoltage wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

My main system still uses a Vega 64 and it plays all the games I'd care about. Undervolts like a champ! Will use it until it dies..

Mine is a Vega 56 that thinks it's a Vega 64. It plays Hitman pretty well, and thats really all I need it for.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#465

Post by platevoltage »

tverbeure wrote: post #198
platevoltage wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

Vega was a card with decent perf/$ for the consumer, but from a pure technical point of view (perf/mm2, perf/BW, perf/W) it was a major failure. Both Vega (and Fiji before it) showed that excess memory BW alone is not sufficient to win.

Oh I never said it was a great card. It does work for what I need it for though.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#466

Post by raydev »

Ray20 wrote: post #298
raydev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be "happening" until Slack, Teams, and Discord leave Electron behind. They are the apps that need to be open 24/7.

It's not entirely clear what the connection is. We're not doing Electron because some popular software also using it. We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.

> We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.

It's closer to 1GB but trust me, everyone is well aware of your priorities.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#467

Post by Legend2440 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #295

It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels. From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

It won't. DRAM prices are cyclical. They were super high in 2020, then demand crashed in 2022 to the point that manufacturers couldn't sell all their inventory.

Now it's high again, but give it a couple years and it'll once again crash.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#468

Post by gtech1 »

ajam1507 wrote: post #239
gtech1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know what human consciousness is. We can't even answer if we have free will or not. And you are proposing that AGI..is what exactly ?

> We don't even know what human consciousness is. I think Douglas Hofstadter satisfactorily answered this question. > We can't even answer if we have free will or not. Sure we can, it's just that most people don't like the answer.

> I think Douglas Hofstadter satisfactorily answered this question.

He didn't prove anything. It's a theory, just like many others: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/

> Sure we can, it's just that most people don't like the answer.

Again, not proven

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#469

Post by gtech1 »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #308
gtech1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know what human consciousness is. We can't even answer if we have free will or not. And you are proposing that AGI..is what exactly ?

The IQ of the smartest human, the perfect memory storing and recollection of computers, the fact that it never tires. I don't know if it's AGI but it's already something greater than us.

ok...there's no 'general' IQ afaik

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#470

Post by joquarky »

Marsymars wrote: post #217
tim-projects wrote: post #5

The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.

I'm skeptical - the apps I use either have a) enough lock-in that they don't have the institutional will to optimize or b) a lack of institutional resources to optimize. Basically, the optimizing that can happen is that I ditch heavy tools in favour of lighter ones, and hopefully enough other people do the same to help lighter tools with finances/dev resources.

That lock-in is going to have to be very deep to fend off reverse engineered clones.
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