Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

"Samsung's 512GB DDR5 memory module is exciting, but it's aimed towards the data center and server market. Consumer DDR5 memory will likely top out at 64GB."

No-one could possibly ever need more than 1TB of RAM.

[EDIT: this was a winking reference to Bill Gates' famously misattributed quip that "640kb ought to be enough for anyone". Truthfully I don't know what to do with 1TB of RAM either, but I'm sure there'll be something!]

View on HN

>Bill Gates' famous quip about no-one ever needing more than 640kb

He never said that.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Oh wow. Thanks. I edited my comment.

He denies he ever said it, there is a difference.

We are talking about somebody who's company has been guilty of corrupting, lying, insulting, patent trolling, vendor locking, user spying, monopoly abusing, etc.

Yet after years of PR, he is now regarded as a hero.

So it's not unreasonable to think maybe he said it and later decided to rewrite history.

Even still, it's extremely unlikely. Unethical as he was, there's little doubt that Gates has an extremely good understanding of computers. And back then, memory limits were extremely tight and programmers ran into them all the time. Graphics and sound were a serious challenge in the DOS era.

Heck, Gates probably remembered the times where a framebuffer was discussed as a theoretical construct, that would be useful if only one could have enough memory to implement one! And at 320x200, that's 10% of your 640K.

> No-one could possibly ever need more than 1TB of RAM.

Need is a tricky word, but it's easy to use 1 TB of RAM, and it'd be easy to use even more. In memory databases are great; it's been a while, but I've run some of those and in some cases, we'd have to partition because we ran out of ram and the boxes topped out at 1.5TB (newer platforms do more, but also there was a platform migration due to acquisition to small machines, so we had to change our strategy). On a desktop system, if you don't have anything better to do, you could always disk cache the whole disk; I suspect a filesystem designed to be fully loaded into ram could make different tradeoffs and get different results than just caching all of a traditional FS.

I personally use my PC as lab for building applications. I tend to run a bunch of VMs and one thing I am always short of is memory. CPU cores were more of a problem in the past but now there is a plenty of cores available. I am currently using 128GB and I would definitely wish more, but probably I wouldn't know what to do with 1TB.

But that doesn't mean there aren't others that may have different use cases.

If you're running a bunch of VMs, technically you could do that just as well with a cluster of smaller PCs. (No individual VM needs 1TB, after all.) I see a lot of people on /r/homelab using RPi clusters for this use-case.

I'm quite sure there's a database admin somewhere salivating at the idea of having that much RAM.

I've also been using 128GB for the last few years on my dev PC. It's great for running VMs, but honestly I could have had 64Gb and would have only rarely noticed the difference.

My replacement PC (actually an Alienware laptop) will only have 64GB. I don't think I'll miss it.

Which RAM brand and configuration are you using? How did it cost?

I have never been able to detect any subjective difference between different brands of RAM chips for consumer products. It is probably one of the most boring components.

I think choice of your chassis has more influence on performance of your PC than particular brand of RAM chips.

About the only choice you have is to decide whether to go ECC or non-ECC.

As all my loads are for development and learning purposes, I decided to save on RAM and buy non-ECC, which makes entire system much cheaper.

4x64gb is already a lot of RAM for a consumer during the ddr5 generation. Even with a 16 core processor with SMT that's 8 GB each for 32 threads. Any larger and it starts to really hurt latencies that consumers actually vie for.

(Typical) servers however have no problem with memory latencies as long as you throw in more channels to compensate with bandwidth. They don't care if the primary task gets done asap they care that 1000 tasks can get done asap and that the db is all in ram.

Wait, how does increasing RAM increase latency?

Having more memory to address means you need more circuits that direct your reads/writes to the right place. Travelling a longer distance / through more complicated routes means the latency for each request will be higher on average.

More of a "if your a consumer that needs more than 1tb RAM, buy a server board" issue. The number of consumers that need that much memory are tiny and don't warrant a manufacturer making a board just for them.

A laptop with 256GB of RAM would be fantastic. I could run VMs all the live long day. Tons of them. Yeah, probably mostly quiescent VMs, but still.

By then Electron will take 300GB to display "hello world" and people will say it's revolutionary.

Many datasets can grow at exponential rates. It's hard to predict what will happen in the long term.

Honestly, I hope we never get to that point on the consumer side.

You aren't looking forward to the day consumer Operating Systems have holodeck-driven UIs? /s

Devs: Chrome and Electron say hi.

HN: Go away, you aren't welcome here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com