51–60 of 69 posts
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Ah yes, the "advertiser's gigabyte". Sort of like a "baker's dozen" but in reverse.
They are honest in how many terabytes/gigabytes. But the computer doesn't report gigabytes (GB). It reports Gibibytes, GiB. Different units. Not saying it's not a dumb situation, just why it's happening.
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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…
"Trit" is often the name, abbreviated from "trinary digit". (Trinary and ternary are interchangeable.)
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Ternary is fun but hard to integrate with existing systems. The headline made me think about storing two bits per cell, like MLC flash does, with 4 levels of charge instead if 2.
Same. Alas, sensing the contents of a DRAM cell in the time allotted is already a tough ask. Having to discriminate between multiple voltage levels would surely make have a nasty latency impact. OTOH, I believe DRAM senses entire rows at a time -- so after that latency hit, bandwidth might be unchanged. Any idea if it is even possible with existing capacitive DRAM cells?
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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.
OMG, lol. Thank you for not making fun of me. More. Coffee. Required.
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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…
It was never worth it, but "worth it" is a pretty slim difference here. 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?
If reaching peak performance requires stuffing all the memory channels, then you still have choices that vary by a factor of 2 choices.
> Couldn't you have put one 32GB and one 16GB module in each channel?
It's a mini-itx board, so only 1 DIMM per channel. I also generally just prefer to put one dimm per channel in machines, because more loading on the memory bus often equals having to tune for less performance.
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Right. Just what we needed, more product differentiation in RAM. Like Intel's 22 versions of the same basic CPU. 10% faster! 2x cache! ...
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.
Interestingly, GPUs don't have the power of 2 mindset. 6GB GPUs have been sold since 2016.
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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.
This isn't a new thing. It's been around several times before, mostly as a way to improve yield where part of the memory is bad. Interestingly, GPUs don't have the power of 2 mindset. 6GB GPUs have been sold since 2016.
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They are honest in how many terabytes/gigabytes. But the computer doesn't report gigabytes (GB). It reports Gibibytes, GiB. Different units. Not saying it's not a dumb situation, just why it's happening.
"ibi" is a retcon. It's not why .
If software developers were:
1. Measuring using base-2 (what we would now call Kibi, Mebi, Gibi)
2. Reporting memory using base-10 prefixes (kilo, mega, giga)
Then its those software developers, not advertisements/sales that were the problem. Those prefixes mean a very specific thing accross all fields. Using kilo to mean 1024 instead of 1000 is objectively wrong. No other field does that.
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"ibi" is a retcon. It's not why .
The phrase is newer, sure, but what was measured hasn't changed. Computers always measured their memory base-2, manufacturers always labeled using base-10.* If software developers were: 1. Measuring using base-2 (what we would now call Kibi, Mebi, Gibi) 2. Reporting memory using base-10 prefixes (kilo, mega, giga) Then its those software developers, not advertisements/sales that were the problem. Those prefixes mean…
> objectively wrong
So is assuming a "byte" has 8 bits. But outside of prescriptivist pedantry, gigabyte has long been used for mostly base two.