Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
That problem (referring to things that are not conventional fast, volatile random access memory as RAM) seems to have only gotten worse in the last twenty years - exacerbated, I believe by the increased use of flash technology (SSDs, etc - which have, admittedly blurred the lines some).
It also doesn't help that smart phone and tablet manufacturers/advertisers have long insisted on referring to the device's long-term storage (also flash tech) as "memory". I doubt that will ever stop bugging me, but I've learned to live with it, albeit curmudgeonly.
Whippersnappers! :-D
> The name Wi-Fi, commercially used at least as early as August 1999, was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand. The Wi-Fi Alliance had hired Interbrand to create a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'."
> The Wi-Fi Alliance used the advertising slogan "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity" for a short time after the brand name was created, and the Wi-Fi Alliance was also called the "Wireless Fidelity Alliance Inc" in some publications.
Elsewhere I've seen that it was chosen because of its similarity to HiFi - which is short for "High Fidelity" (regarding audio equipment):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fidelity
> High fidelity (often shortened to Hi-Fi or HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is important to audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range.
However, there seems to be a lot of debate as to whether the 'Fi' in WiFi was ever fully accepted to mean "Fidelity". So pretty much it seems marketing people liked the way "WiFi" sounded, so they used it.
"Menu bar", "dock", "toolbar", "menu", and other similar terms are used more or less at random.
It's simply not common for the average user to know the names of UI components.
The screen saver mixup makes no sense though. That can only mean one thing.
For a lot of people all their connected devices at home are wireless: smart devices, phones, many have laptops rather than desktops, tablets, …, and while out the connect to other wi-fi networks. It is easy to circulate WiFi and cellular data access, and if you don't use much or any wired networking at home all your normal network access is therefore WiFi.
Screensaver as wallpaper is more rare but I have heard it, and have done for some time (I know non-technical people who have used wallpaper and screen saver wrong for many years, going back to when fancy screen savers were more common than simply powering off, either calling both by one name or just using them randomly). More common these days though is people simply not knowing the term, except to confuse it with a physical screen protector.
Thankfully everyone was like "NO. Don't do that, here's how to install a wireless router to your ethernet setup"
I Have frequently heard phrase at work "you plug into here to get wifi". My family and in laws absolutely positively do not understand the difference between wifi and internet. In particular, the idea that they may be connected to wifi but not have internet is an alien, incomprehensible notion.
It depends who you hang around with. Computer professionals understand the difference. Most others do not as they don't need to - empirically, to majority of population, wifi IS internet (as opposed to cell phones, of course, which use "data":)
- someone in a much to near future
After a few rounds sure. The entire Internet is down. I’m going to go play an online game.
- Sales guy
CRT monitor were a relatively late addition to terminal devices. Traditional terminals were hardcopy printers; they printed the output you received onto paper.
...and then had to be told that the cable you plug into the back of a landline telephone isn't just a power connector. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever know how she thought telephones actually worked.
I think. But who knows.
It shouldn't make sense to us either; it's a ridiculous kludge resulting from the fact that we've never figured out how to make memory fast, dense, cheap, and nonvolatile at the same time.
Actually Intel did figure it out with Optane. Then they killed it because computer designers couldn't figure out how to build computers without the multilevel memory kludge. IMHO this is the single dumbest thing that happened in computer science in the last ten years.
My takeway: Optane was good technology that was killed by Intel's thoroughly wrong-headed marketing. It's cheaper than DRAM but more expensive than flash. And much faster than flash, so it makes the fastest SSDs. But those SSDs are too expensive for everybody except niche server farms who need the fastest possible storage. And that's not a big enough market to get the kinks worked out of a new physics technology and achieve economies of scale.
Intel thought they knew how to fix that: They sold Optane DIMMs to replace RAM. But they also refused to talk about how it worked, be truthful about the fact that it probably had a limited number of write cycles, or describe even one killer use case. So nobody wanted to trust it with mission-critical data.
Worst of all, Intel only made DIMMs for Intel processors that had the controller on the CPU die. ARM? AMD? RISC-V? No Optane DIMMs for you. This was the dealbreaker that made every designer say "Thanks Intel but I'm good with DRAM." As they said on the podcast, Intel wanted Optane to be both proprietary and ubiquitous, and those two things almost never go together. (Well obviously they do. See Apple for example. But the hosts were discussing fundamental enabling technology, not integrated systems.)
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rip-optane/id162593222...
Well, of course that makes no sense. It isn't true.
We use volatile memory because we do need low latency, and volatile memory is a cheap way to accomplish that. But the forgetting isn't a feature that we would miss if it went away. It's an antifeature that we work around because volatile memory is cheap.
This is a catastrophic misunderstanding. I have no idea how you think a computer works, but if memory leaks are written to permanent storage, that will have no effect on anything. The difference between volatile and non-volatile memory is in whether the data is lost when the system loses power.
A memory leak has nothing at all to do with that question. A leak occurs when software at some level believes that it has released memory while software at another level believes that that memory is still allocated to the first software. If your Electron app leaks a bunch of memory, that memory will be reclaimed (or more literally, "recognized as unused") when the app is closed. That's true regardless of whether the memory in question could persist through a power outage. Leaks don't stay leaked because they touch the hard drive -- touching the hard drive is something memory leaks have done forever! They stay leaked because the software leaking them stays alive.
I'm aware. This is a feature for me - I disable suspend/hibernate/resume functionality. I don't want hiberfile.sys taking up space (irrelevant in this scenario, I guess) and I certainly don't want programs to reopen themselves after a restart, especially if it was a crash. If all storage were nonvolatile, OSes would behave as though resuming from hibernate (S4) all the time.
> that memory will be reclaimed [. . .] when the app is closed.
Again, I'm aware. I'm glad you've never had any sort of crash or freeze that would prevent closing a program, but it does happen.
OSes would need to implement a sort of virtual cold boot to clear the right areas of memory, even after a BSOD or kernel panic. Probably wouldn't be that hard, but it would have to happen.
Are you? Because according to your words in this more recent comment, your original comment was meaningless gibberish.
> If all storage were nonvolatile, OSes would behave as though resuming from hibernate (S4) all the time.
That isn't even possible to do. Thus, obviously, it would not be done.
What? Of course it has to have a first boot sometime, but past that S5 would no longer need to exist.
In terms of software robustness though, starting from scratch occasionally is a useful thing. Sure, ideally all our software would be correct and would have no way of getting into strange, broken or semi-broken states. In practice, I doubt we'll every get there. Heck, even biology does the same thing: the birth of child is basically a reboot that throws away the parent's accumulated semi-broken state.
We have built systems in software that try to be fully persistent, but they never caught on. I believe that's for a good reason.
It explains how the documents at arm reach on the desk are faster to access than the things in the cabinets. It obscures the fact that stuff on the desk dissapears if the power supply glitches even just a little.
In fact we invented these batteries with electronics which sense if the electricity is about to go out so the computer has time to carry the documents from the desk to the cabinets before they dissapear. And we think this is normal and even necessary in pro settings. (I’m talking about uninterrupted power supplies of course.)
This isn't even intentional absurdity. The theme of the song is bragging. Here are some other lyrics.
I'm down with Bill Gates
I call him "Money" for short
I phone him up at home
and I make him do my tech support
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great,
if you could use a nice heavy paperweight
Installed a T1 line in my house
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I understand why you might argue that, but I've been surprised in the past by people who were fairly-well-versed on computers (no pun intended), but still called hard drive space "memory".
I should go listen to that section of the song again (like I said elsewhere, it isn't one of my favorites of his). By intentional absurdity, I meant that I could see Al intending this to be a case of bragging in an absurd way "Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills, I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM".
But now that I noticed the "I" in the middle there (I had missed it before), I'm guessing I was wrong in thinking the lines could be cause-and-effect (which would be the source of the absurdity).
Well, it is secondary memory. Besides, absolutely, it is memory. It's just not the main memory in a relative context about your computer.
In fact, "storage" and "memory" mean about the same thing. And since it's not technically the main or primary memory of our computers anymore, and RAM is actually an implementation detail that all of the in-machine memory shares, I'm not sure I have a good pedantic name for it.
Nope. A pagefile is random-access memory backed by your sequential-access hard drive (or, hey, maybe your random-access SSD) instead of your "RAM".
At the CPU side, there is an in-package device that communicates with the memory controller by a protocol where sequential readings have lower latency than random ones. It communicates with an in-die device, that finally communicates with the CPU with a protocol that provides random access. That last one is obviously not called "RAM".
This is the root cause of why everyone is arguing with you. For some reason, TFA quotes the defrag line and the RAM line as if they are somehow paired, which you've also latched onto, but it makes no sense to consider them as a pair. Many lines in this song are to be interpreted as their own complete thought. And if we really want to pair up consecutive lines, wouldn't we use lines that rhyme to do so?
...
Nine to five, chillin' at Hewlett Packard? // Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?
Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills // Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM // I never feed trolls and I don't read spam
Installed a T1 line in my house // Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse
...
As I said before, this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs (many of which I could sing along with word-for-word from memory). I was never crazy about the song, so I am not surprised that I didn't know the surrounding context (which the original article left out). Still, I don't think you can exclude the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship spanning the middle of two rhyming lines (perhaps particularly, in rap music), but after seeing and hearing the lines in context, I don't think that was Al's intention here.
But to my knowledge not many purchase it. As the article says, the defaults for new items on the main vendors are still 8 or 16. I suspect most could be happy with 32GB for the next 3 years but that isn't a default.
People don't really understand the speed vs. bandwidth debate, but they do know the psychological difference when latency is low enough to be unnoticeable.
https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-its-all-about-the-penti...
- BeOS 4.5 (including some beta versions)
- BeOS 5 (including some beta versions)
- Windows NT 4.0
- OS2/Warp
- Windows 95 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions)
- Windows 98 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions)
- PC-DOS
- MS-DOS with DosShell
- MS-DOS with Windows 3.11
- Whatever old version of MacOS was on the school computers
- Slackware
I was also on mIRC and downloading from newsgroups regularly.
I think many ISP's would give you guides about using email/newsgroups back then as those services were considered required for an ISP. TUCOWS was super popular for this newfangled WinSOCK software (TUCOWS stands for The Ultimate Collection Of WinSOCK Software). I remember testing how fast the first consumer cable internet connections were by downloading from them.
You are right for most people that stuff was probably obscure.
There was no such thing as a OS-monoculture.
At this point, however, I'm willing to give Al the benefit of the doubt. It certainly would be "in character" (for lack of a better term), for him to be knowledgeable enough to know the difference. But I have been surprised by others on this particular point in the past.
> Upgrade my system at least twice a day
> What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
> You say you've had your desktop for over a week? > Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
The lines around it are
"Paying the bills with my mad programming skills
Defragging my hard drive for thrills
Got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam"
They're not really related to each other besides being right next to each other. The lines rhyme with other lines. Which, if you were trying to link ideas lyrically, is where you'd do it, on the rhyme.
But, the entire song is just a litany of various brags centered around technology. It is, like most of Al's work, pretty clever and knowledgeable. Not only of the source material, but of the subject presented.
It is possible to think of it in a cause-and-effect way "Defragging my hard drive for thrills got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM". Which, honestly, I could see Al saying that as a purposefully absurd statement (because the first could not cause the second, but people brag like that all of the time).
I will admit that, although it seems like it should be (given my profession), this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs --and I've been a fan for decades. So while I have heard it many times, I can't remember the last time I listened to it.
But as I said elsewhere in this thread, I have been surprised in the past by people I would have described as fairly tech-savvy, who still called hard drive space "memory".
However, if the two phrases are related (as opposed to just being adjacent in the song), at this point I'd guess Al does probably know the difference, and the relationship is intended to be intentionally over-the-top absurd bragging.
I mean, “memory” in the computer sense is by analogy t memory in the brain sense, which is used for both short and long term storage (and I’d argue more commonly for long term storage). It therefore doesn’t seem unreasonable to me for people to call a computers long term storage it’s “memory”. The function of a hard drive is to remember things.
It goes the other way too, RAM is a type of storage, which is the terminology IBM uses (and I think has used since the 60s or so).
That's why I always had to make sure to say "RAM" when I meant memory in the 90s.
Where did it do that?
That's not really incorrect, though. RAM is random access memory, as opposed to memory that has other access patterns.
It's less common these days, but among people who learned to use computers in the 80s, you'll still hear some use "memory" to refer to storage that isn't RAM.
Swap space on disk is a cache of RAM, if you want to go down that path - but RAM and disk support entirely different purposes.
lost credibility here
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet
I can only conclude that he did understand the distinction between RAM and hard drive space. The song is full of jokes that show a deep understanding of the topic. Indeed I don't find any nits to pick.
All I think I've ever seen is anyone who says "ram" knows what ram is, and people who are fuzzy on it call it all "memory".
However, I'm sure I have heard a few people use RAM when they meant hard drive space. Though, in fairness, those were probably friends/relatives who used computers but didn't know a lot about how they actually work.
> Defragging my hard drive occasionally, when I start to notice drops in i/o performance
> I got me 32 megabytes of RAM
No thank you.
Can someone explain why this is incorrect? I thought a hard drive is typically what one would defrag
That's exactly what clearly points to it being about RAM.
> So the question is whether the two lines are related
There's no reason to think that they're related.
I don’t remember ever defragging anything but my hard drive.
It was probably just that a gigabyte sounds big, 100 sounds big. Therefore, 100 gigs
It's not really plausible in the context of those lyrics.
The article answers its own question by pointing out SSDs allow better swapping, bus is wider and RAM is more and more integrated into processor, etc.
But I think this misses the point. Did these solutions make it uneconomic to increase RAM density, or did scaling challenges in RAM density lead to a bunch of other nearby things getting better to compensate?
I'd guess the problem is in scaling RAM density itself because performance is just not very good on 8gb macbooks, compared to 16gb. If "unified memory" was really that great, I'd expect there to be largely no difference in perceived quality.
Does anyone have expertise in RAM manufacturing challenge?
Back when I had a 386 DX 40 MHz with 4MB RAM and 170MB disk, everything was at a premium. Drawing a game at a decent framerate at 320x200 required careful coding. RAM was always scarce. That disk space ran out in no time at all, and even faster one CD drives showed up.
I remember spending an inordinate time on squeezing out more disk space, and using stuff like DoubleSpace to make more room.
Today I've got a 2TB SSD and that's plenty. Once in a while I notice I've got 500GB worth of builds lying around, do some cleaning, and problem solved for the next 6 months.
I could get more storage but it'd be superfluous, it'd just allow for accumulating more junk before I need a cleaning.
RAM is similar, at some point it ceases to be constraining. 16GB is an okay amount to have unless you run virtual machines, or compile large projects using 32 cores at once (had to upgrade to 64GB for that).
I'd say that's about enough to comfortably use a browser with a few tabs on an otherwise pristine machine with nothing unusual running in background (and I'm not sure about memory requirements of all the typically prenistalled crapware). Start opening more tabs or install some apps and 8GB RAM is going to run out real quick.
And it goes as low as 4 - which is a bad joke. That's appropriate only for quite special low-memory uses (like a thin client, preferably based on a special low-resource GNU/Linux distro) or "I'll install my own RAM anyway so I don't care what comes stock" scenario.
But outside of bugs I can see why we're not at 100GB - even with a PopOS VM soaking up 8GB and running Firefox for at least a day or two with maybe 30 tabs, I'm only at 21GB used. Most of that is Firefox and Edge.
I have learnt the ways of vertices. Not great at making the model I want, but getting there.
320x200 is 64,000 pixels.
If you want to maintain 20 fps, then you have to render 1,280,000 pixels per second. At 40 Mhz, that's 31.25 clock cycles per pixel. And the IPC of a 386 was pretty awful.
That's also not including any CPU time for game logic.
But, well, a lot can be done in 30 cycles. If it's a 2D game, then you're mostly blitting sprites. If there's no need for translucency, each row can be reduced to a memcpy (i.e. probably REP MOVSD).
Something like Doom had to do a lot more tricks to be fast enough. Though even then it still repainted all the pixels.
Compute resource consumption is like a gas, it expands to fill whatever container you give it.
Things didn't reach a comfortable level, Moore's Law just slowed down a lot so bloat slowed at pace. When developers can get a machine with twice as much resources every year and a half, things feel uncomfortable real quick for everybody else. When developer's can't ... things stop being so uncomfortable for everyone.
However, there is a certain amount of physical reality that has capped needs. Audio and video have limits to perceptual differences; with a given codec (which are getting better as well) there is a maximum bitrate where a human will be able to experience an improvement. Lots of arguing about where exactly, but the limit exists and so the need for storage/compute/memory to handle media has a max and we've hit that.
Now, with SSDs, it's a lot cheaper and faster to read disk, and especially with NVMe, you don't have to read things sequentially. You just "throw the spaghetti at the wall" with regards to all the blocks you want, and it services them. So you don't need nearly as much page cache to have "teh snappy" in your responsiveness.
We've also added compressed RAM to all major OSes (Windows has it, MacOS has it, and Linux at least normally ships with zswap built as a module, though not enabled). So that further improves RAM efficiency - part of the reason I can use 64-bit 4GB ARM boxes is that zswap does a very good job of keeping swap off the disk.
We're using RAM more efficiently than we used to be, and that's helped keep "usable amounts" somewhat stable.
Don't worry, though. Electron apps have heard the complaint and are coming for all the RAM you have! It's shocking just how much less RAM something like ncspot (curses/terminal client for Spotify) uses than the official app...
And I feel the operating systems have gotten better at paging out large portions of these stupid electron apps, but that may just be wishful thinking.
Whirlwind I (1951): 2048 16-bit words, so 4k bytes. This was the first digital computer to use core memory (and the first to operate on more than one bit at a time).
EDVAC (designed in 1944): 1024 44 bit-words, so about 5.6k.
ENIAC (designed in 1943): No memory at all, at least not like we think of it.
So there you go. All but the earliest digital computer used an address space greater than eight bits wide. I'm sure there are some micro controllers and similar that have only eight bit address spaces, but general purpose machines seem to have started at 12-bits and gone up from there.
NVMe is actually not any better than SATA SSDs at random/low-queue-depth IO. The latency-per-request is about the same for the flash memory itself and that's really the dominant factor in purely random requests.
Of course pretty soon NVMe will be used for DirectStorage so it'll be preferable to have it in terms of CPU load/game smoothness, but just in terms of raw random access, SSDs really haven't improved in over a decade at this point. Which is what was so attractive about Optane/3D X-point... it was the first improvement in disk latency in a really long time, and that makes a huge difference in tons of workloads, especially consumer workloads. The 280/480GB Optane SSDs were great.
But yeah you're right that paging and compression and other tricks have let us get more out of the same amount of RAM. Browsers just need to keep one window and a couple tabs open, and they'll page out if they see you launch a game, etc, so as long as one single application doesn't need more than 16GB it's fine.
Also, games are really the most intensive single thing that anyone will do. Browsers are a bunch of granular tabs that can be paged out a piece at a time, where you can't really do that with a game. And games are limited by what's being done with consoles... consoles have stayed around the 16GB mark for total system RAM for a long time now too. So the "single largest task" hasn't increased much, and we're much better at doing paging for the granular stuff.
1. Pretty sure IO depth is as high as OSes can make it so small depth only happens on a mostly idle system.
2. Throughput of NVMe is 10x higher than SATA. So in terms of “time to read the whole file” or “time to complete all I/O requests”, it is also meaningfully better from that perspective.
The fastest NVMe SSD[0] on UserBenchmark appears to be a fair bit faster at 4k random read compared to the fastest SATA SSD[1].
75 MB/s vs 41.9 MB/s Avg Random 4k Read.
1,419 MB/s vs 431 MB/s Avg Deep queue 4k read
Edit: This comment has been edited, originally I was comparing a flash SATA SSD vs an optane nvme drive, which wasn't a fair comparison.
[0]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1311638/Samsung-SSD-...
[1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1463967/Samsung-SSD-...
It's true that NVMe does better with a higher queue depth though, but, consumer workloads tend to be QD=1 (you don't start the next access until this one has been finished) and that's the pathological case due to the inherent latency of flash access. Flash is pretty bad at those scenarios whether SATA or NVMe.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11953/burst-rr.png
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-optane-ssd-90...
So eh, I suppose it's true that NVMe is at least a little better in random 4K QD=1, a 960 Pro is 59.8 MB/s vs 38.8 for the 850 Pro (although note that's only a 256GB drive, which often don't have all their flash lanes populated and a 1TB or 2TB might be faster). But it's not really night-and-day better, they're still both quite slow. In contrast Optane can push 420-510 MB/s in pure 4K Random QD=1.
I think for most use cases ssd is fast enough though.
> It does all my work without me even askin'
It sounds like Wierd Al had the same use case!
I'd guess now that the market for smartphones is pretty mature we should start seeing further RAM increases in the coming years.
The other dirty secret is home computers are still single-tasking machines. They may have many programs running, but the user is doing a single task.
Server RAM has continued to grow each and every year.
It isn't often you really want it, but it is nice to have when you do. I am still bitter at Intel for mainstream 4-core'ing it for years...
Honestly I think the pace of advance has left me behind too now, as the pool of jobs that really need the next increment of "more" goes down. There might be a few tasks that can readily consume more and more silicon for the foreseeable, but more and more tasks will become "better doesn't matter". (someone's going to butt in and say their workload needs way more. Preemptively, I am happy for you. Maybe even a little jealous and certainly interested to hear. But not all cool problems have massive data)
I bought a 32MB SIMM to attach to my DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my PowerMac 6100/60 for $300 in 1996.
Even as late as 2008, having 4GB RAM was not common.
I wish. Y2k3, AMD Athlon, 256MB of RAM. That could run the whole KDE, Kopete, Konqueror and Amarok DE combo in a breeze.
Even modern games don't usually use more than eg. 16gigs
Developers are a whole different story, that's why it's not unusual to find business-class laptops with 64+ gigs of ram (just for the developer to run the development environment, usually consisting of multiple virtual machines).
It is a Lenovo T400 with 4GB of RAM. In order to maximise the life span of the SSD, I knocked out the swap sector. So that is 4GB, no option to move beyond that.
That said in daily use, I have never seen my usage go anywhere near 3GB but I suspect that is just because I am very frugal with my browsing and keep cleaning up unused tabs.
Smartphones gradually became the limiting factor
Like - fuck. this. shit.
I will take - in a heartbeat - (we'd all better!) whatever slight decrease in performance and slightly larger design that comes from not being soldered in half a microsecond if it means I can actually upgrade the RAM later on after my purchase.
Not just because I want continued value out of my purchase - because honestly, that's not even getting started on the amount of eWaste that must be created from this selfish, harmful; wasteful pattern.
Think about all the MacBook Airs out there stuck with 4GB of RAM and practically useless 128GB SSD's that could be useful if Apple didn't intentionally make them useless.
We've certainly gone very far backward in terms of any computer hardware worth purchasing in the last ten years.
I really don't get the point, beyond greed - of this whole soldering garbage. No performance or size benefits can be worth not being able to continue to reap value from my investment a couple years down the road.
This not only creates seriously less waste, but also nurtures a healthy, positive attitude of valuing our hardware instead of seeing it as a throwaway, replaceable thing.
I truly hope environmental laws make it illegal at some point. The EU seems to be good with that stuff. The soldering issue accomplishes literally nothing beyond nurturing, continuing, and encouraging a selfish culture of waste that only gets worse the more and more accepted we allow it to become.
We've only got one planet. It's way - way - WAY - past time we started acting like it.
Ten years ago, the state of hardware was far more sustainable than it is now.
For. Fucking. Shame.
Then for awhile you could use SSDs to do the same thing.
But now it’s all laptops as far as the eye can see, with soldered RAM.
So, of course, MacOS takes ~8GB of RAM to do effectively nothing, such is about the same for windows.
Unless you're running something like alpine Linux these days, you're going to be eating a ton of RAM and cycles for surveillance, telemetry, and other silly 'features' for these companies.
I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one.
The soldering uses significantly less power.
Wow, that statement reeks of having so much privilege it’s like you forgot that this isn’t financially feasible for a lot of people, and that upgrading down the line allowed someone to afford a lower spec computer at the time.
Like - you do get not everyone’s wealthy af, yeah? And that companies intentionally bloat the cost of first party memory and stuff so that if you’re not insanely privileged; like I guess you are, then, no - it’s not even…it doesn’t even make sense.
All this does is steal from the poor to give to the rich.
It’s a matter of efficiency, somebody pays for all those ram slots to get made and the electricity to power them. Now that computer memory is growing generation over generation at a slower rate, and now that other sources of power waste have been eliminated, I reckon there’s less and less reason to go with slots.
It is a shame that this allows vendors to charge non-market prices for products but the problem I have is that this has become peoples main argument to preserve slotted memory. It’s an objectively inferior technology for mobile devices we use so we can pay market prices for memory. Realistically though, slotted memory is doomed if the only argument for it, since manufacturers have every incentive to stop offering the option of slots. Even if they wanted to offer a customer competitive market prices for memory there’s little reason they couldn’t do that with soldered memory.
10 years ago, mainstream computers were being built with i5-2500ks in them. Now, for a similar price point you might be looking at a Ryzen 5 5600x. User Benchmark puts this at a 50-60% increase in effective 1/2/4 core workloads, and a 150-160% increase in 8 core workloads.
Compared to the changes in SSDs (64GB/128GB SATA3 being mainstream then, compared to 1TB NVMe now) or GPUs (Can an HD6850 and RTX 3060 even be compared!?), it's pretty meagre!
I recall hearing a few years back that User Benchmark was wildly unreliable where AMD was involved, presenting figures that made them look much worse than they actually were. No idea of the present situation. I also vaguely recall the “effective speed” rating being ridiculed (unsure if this is connected with the AMD stuff or not), and +25% does seem rather ridiculous given that its average scores are all over +50%, quite apart from things like the memory speed (the i5-2500K supported DDR3 at up to 1333MHz, the 5600X DDR4 at up to 3200MHz).
An alternative comparison comes from PassMark, who I think are generally regarded as more reliable. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-R... presents a much more favourable view of the 5600X: twice as fast single-threaded, and over 5.3× as fast for the multi-threaded CPU Mark.
Also, data fields like 64-Core Perf were made less prominent on Part Lists and Benchmark Result pages around the time Zen+ and Zen 2 All-Core outperformed comparable Intel parts. 1-Core Perf and 8-Core Perf were prioritized on highly visible pages, putting Intel on top of the default filtered list of CPUs.
However, the dataset produced by the millions of benchmarks remains apparently unmolested, and all the data is still visible going back a decade or more, if not slightly obscured by checkboxes and layout changes. (https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1)
https://thememoryguy.com/dram-prices-hit-historic-low/
As to why, search for words like "dram scaling challenge". I'm no expert but I believe capacitor (lack of) scaling is the biggest problem. While transistors and interconnections continued shrinking, capacitors suitable for use in DRAM circuits ran out of steam around 2xnm.
Another factor is in speed; In that ten year span we went from DDR3 to DDR5, moving from 17000 to 57600 transfers per second over that time frame. SSDs are much more common meaning it's easier to keep RAM full of only the things you need at the moment and drop what you don't out.
In terms of RAM density increasing, I think it's been more driven by demand than anything and there simply isn't a serious demand out there except in the very high end server space. Even compute is more driven by GPU than system memory, so you're mostly talking about companies that want to run huge in-memory databases, versus in the past when the entire industry has been starving for more memory density. The story has been speed matters more.
I'd also suggest that improvements in compression and hardware-assisted decompression for video streams have made a difference, as whatever is in memory on your average consumer device is smaller.
Coupling this with efficiency improvements of things like DirectStorage where the data fed into the GPU doesn't even need to touch RAM, the requirement to have high system memory available will be further lessened for gaming or compute workloads going forward.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372
[2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...
Yea, seems[1] that's the issue. I wrote some more about it in my other[2].
[1]: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram...
I no longer need to have local resources to do amazing things. I don't need an 10GB+ GPU in my phone to be able to hit some website and use AI to generate images. I have fast web/email search capabilities that don't require me to have a local index of all of it. I can spin up a remote compute cluster with as much RAM as I need if I want some heavy lifting done, and then throw it all away when I'm finished.
"Back in the day" we would try to build for all that we could perceive we would do in the next 5 years, and maybe upgrade memory half way through that cycle if things changed. We ran a lot of things locally, and would close apps if we needed to open something needy. I think also systems have gotten a lot better at sharing and doing memory swapping (see comments about SSD helping here). Back in the old days, if you ran out of memory, the app would just not open at all, or crash.
For example "WindowServer" on my Mac is using 1.22G at the moment by itself.
For Chrome tabs:
95MB static cost per tab; some sites load a lot of data: console.cloud.google.com takes 1GiB of ram for me; LinkedIn takes about 700MiB
Jira, Confluence, Google Cloud Console, Slack and Gmail on my machine consume 4GiB when running simultaneously.
That's before I have things like teams, onedrive/dropbox, docker or an IDE.
I don't think 16G is too little, but I could see how there's a potential there to run out quite easily.
PS: Then I opened another 3 tabs (of YT videos) and it jumped to 5.2 GB.
I have never seen Chrome starting to use much less memory when memory pressure becomes high and I have been monitoring it many times. There is some GC like behavior releasing a small amount of memory from time to time, but nothing really significant when systems starts running out of avaliable physical memory.
I'm at the point of wanting 32-64gb of memory these days, but only because I like messing with huge datasets.
I'm honestly perplexed I don't have more problems as the machine I do most of my reading/browsing on is more than a decade old and doesn't even have a GPU. Plus I nearly always have 2 messaging apps, a pdf viewer, and 1-3 other browsers running simultaneously, maybe a logging app too. All running on Windows 10, it's not some turbocharged Gentoo installation or anything.
- Add the "--light" parameter to your desktop shortcut/script/launcher.
I can't find documentation for any "--light" flag, so it's unclear what that does / if it still works. But I appreciate the suggestions.
I work in advertising, so I think using Ublock Origin is hypocritical
I sincerely think that your industry makes the internet way worse than it needs to be.
If the reason it's "the user can't be tracked equally without a JS Big Brother behemoth", then they don't understand how cookies can be used for that, or by just parsing the user tweets and preferences.
Perhaps, but most people don't use the Cloud for anything fancy, but to run SaaS apps like email, calendars, note applications, chat, and so on, that could be way better off served by local apps, and not only run better and be faster, but take less resources than they do running on the Cloud...
Like Slack (be it electron "app" or browser tab) taking 100x the resources to do roughly what ICQ did 20 years ago...
I used to run into "not enough RAM" situations frequently and convinced my company to splurge 4K EUR on a Macbook Pro with 64 GBs of RAM. I'm very happy with it.
I also had to block several planned purchases where somebody unrelated to the work my team does decided to order MacBooks with 8GBs of RAM for new team members. It's 2022 my dude, the 2000s called and they want their 4*2GB RAM kits back.
From a consumer perspective on the other hand, I feel that current machines with 8GB of RAM run typical software (browsers and whatnot) well enough.
I'm on an 8Gb M1 Macbook Air and really don't notice it swapping often, unless I'm running something heavy in addition to browser + terminal + IntelliJ IDEA.
I feel the real use of high amounts of memory is to run bad software.
with 8GB and the Intel NUC own as a desktop (Alpine Linux XFCE), with UBo I can open dozens of tabs without blinking.
That's because it is. Memory is failing to scale. That's why there's so much investment in alternative memory technologies, including why Intel sunk so much money into 3D XPoint despite the losses. But the market is brutally optimized, hence the difficulty cracking it.
6 transistors aren't dense, so are capacitors in integrated circuits. Comparatively with NAND, it only needs one (floating gate) transistor.
Samsung is working on 3D-stacked DRAM cells: https://www.i-micronews.com/samsung-electronics-gearing-up-t...
Last week, several posts made it to the HN front page of stable diffusion forks that reduce the memory usage, to make it possible to generate 512x512 images with < 10 GB GPU memory, but with a tradeoff in computing speed. Trying to go beyond HD resolution (far from phone photo resolution) will still blow out your top-of-the-line Nvidia consumer GPU.
When approaches like these will be hitting your favorite image editing tool, you'll want to get that 256 GB RAM iPad for your mom. Otherwise, you'll have to deal with her having to wait minutes to give your family cat a festive hat in last year's Christmas picture.
- Neuromancer, by William Gibson, 1984
I’ve been watching Facebook Marketplace recently for a cheap Mac Laptop, and I was surprised to find the place is absolutely flooded with near-new MacBook Pros with 8gb of RAM. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s the worst place to cheap out - it’s not upgradable and makes a huge performance difference.
I suspect it might be self-selecting. The reason there are so many on Facebook Marketplace is because the owners can feel they need an upgrade. Do they know the reason for it’s lackluster performance being the lack of RAM? Maybe not, they just know the machine runs poorly and are going to upgrade to a newer one with 8gb of RAM.
To contrast my 11 year old iMac I was upgrading from has 24gb of RAM and still held up fine as my daily driver. The lack of software upgrades being the thing that pushed me to upgrade.
(I would have gotten more RAM in the 2019 laptop, but it was during that brief window where new laptop shipping times were measured in months, and I was happy to have ANY work laptop and not have to be using my old personal one, an old Air.)
While the baseline of 8GB hasn't risen, I do think the floor of what we'd consider "unnecessary" has risen. I remember in 2018 I was building a new desktop and I spent a pretty penny on 32GB of RAM; folks on r/buildapc said that was a waste. Now and days I feel like I've seen a lot of higher end builds that feature 32GB or even 64GB.
Just my 2c; I don't have stats to back this up or anything...
The only real use is writing horrifying malloc experiments and having a couple extra seconds to kill them before OOMing.
OEMs were selling 64MB desktops right up until vista was released.
Today, windows 11 requires 4GB or ram. If windows 12 (or whatever they're going to call the next windows, they're not too good at counting) required the same sized jump between XP and Vista, it'd require 64GB or ram.
That's gotta be painful, though, unless you only ever use a single browser tab.
Then, I built a Vista machine in 2007 with 2GB to start, and it was clearly not enough, immediately filled the other 2 slots to go to 4GB.
Vista required 512 MB. In practice, that probably sucked, but those were the paper specs.
XP might have required 64 MB on paper but it crawled and was practically useless on that spec (like Windows 95 was on 4 MB). Never saw anyone do it. A common spec in 2001 would be 256 MB or at an absolute minimum, 128.
Vista came out in 2007 and absolutely no one was selling 64 MB desktop computers at that point. 64 MB is 1997-1998 spec -- in 2007 it would commonly be 512 MB or 1 GB.
It is true, however, that Vista had astronomically high minimum specs for the time -- some machines sold at the time could just barely run it -- and that it probably drove a lot of upgrades.
The only thing I can think of that'd ever max out my RAM is some sort of training task (even though I'd expect to run out of VRAM first). But those are the kinds of tasks that do best on distributed systems since you don't really need to care about them, just spin it up, run your task, and tear it back down
The first time I built an AOSP image from scratch was on some dinky office workstation that had been freshly upgraded with a whopping 16GBs so you wouldn't come back in the next morning to a random OOM
These days I get to open a PR and some random monster of a machine on a build farm does the heavy lifting, but I can still say from a lot of experience that 64GB is truly more than plenty for Android OS builds and definitely won't be what keeps you from doing other stuff... IO and CPU usage might make it an interesting proposition, but not RAM.
When Google says 64GB it's for the whole machine: the build process will use a lot of it when configured properly, but not so much that you can't run anything else
(Also again, Android builds are a perfect example of where a remote machine pays off in spades. The spin up is such a small fraction of what's needed you don't have to start messing with containerization if you don't want to, and you can get access to some insanely large instance for a few hours then stop paying for it as soon as it's done.
It just seems unlikely to have a task that warrants that much RAM that isn't just about throwing resources at an otherwise "stateless" task that's a great match for cloud compute)
> The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit. It doesn’t feel like we’ve budged meaningfully here for years. Or is that just me?
Then less than 3 comments in somehow it became we start justifying 256 GBs of RAM?
256 GBs of RAM can be useful in some cases, on some computers, in some places, but that's not really a meaningful inference? 1TB of RAM can be useful depending on the workload, any given number could be.
The question is can it be useful for anything even vaguely resembling personal computing, and the answer is for all intents and purposes: No. It's not.
Your experiences are not the indicative of everyones experiences.
> The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit. It doesn’t feel like we’ve budged meaningfully here for years. Or is that just me?
This was the comment that kicked off the thread. Some people felt 32 GBs was the new baseline, and then out of left field comes _256 GBs_
For any amount of RAM, someone somewhere will be able to use it. But that's the kind of deep observation I expect from a toddler.
If we're going past kiddie pool deep observations of plain fact, no, the baseline wouldn't be anywhere near 256 GBs of RAM based on how people use computers.
(And before you attack me for your own poor understanding of language again: People as in the human collective. "People don't need" is not the same as "no one needs".)
I was commenting on how you seemed to make yourself the arbiter of how much ram one could ever possibly use.
> you seemed to make yourself the arbiter
I didn't. At least, not to those of us who can deal with some flexibility in interpreting written communication, and use a little tool called context.
But then again, there are definitely people out there who need every. single. nuance. of the most basic statement spelled out for them, as if they're biological GPT-3 endpoint (and this site certainly does feel like it's drowning in those people these days) but I don't write comments for them.
Instead I write comments for people who are interested in actual conversation over browbeating everyone in site because they assumed the most useless interpretation of your statement was the correct one.
The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit.
I'm still comfortable with 4GB (and currently using ~1GB of it), because I stay away from the bloated web stuff. Outside of certain applications, I think there really isn't a need for huge amounts of RAM; unlike e.g. storage, which even I have several TBs of, simply because of accumulating media.
In the terminal I'm running a tmux/vim based development environment.
Of the half dozen non-technical users whose habits I know, I think all of them use their PC exclusively for a browser. They could sub in a chromebook, I guess.
The first 64 bit Pentium system went to market in 2004. With 32 bit systems the maximum memory addressable per process is 4gb; this could be stretched to 64gb with PAE [2]. It might have been possible to get a 64gb RAM pentium-based server in 1999. But 100GB is simply impossible.
There were 64 bit processors from other families available in 1999. DEC, SGI, and Sun all had workstations using 64 bit processors. The earliest I can find supporting 128gb of RAM though is the SGI Origin 3800, shipping in 2001. [3]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_with_Scissors_(%22We... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_3000_and_Onyx_300...
The computer now works on my rhythm, not its own. No need to suspend tabs or do any other shenanigans. Sometimes it's just not productive to stop everything to clean up tabs and/or open apps. Some rabbit holes are actually quite worth digging into, and they are often RAM-hungry!
Going from 16 to 64 gb on my personal laptop meant I got to choose when to deal with my own mess... on my own terms. I much prefer to do this cleaning exercise on weekends, versus "whenever the computer starts choking up".
So yeah, highly agree with the author here. Wish Apple laptops were RAM upgradable, but I doubt that will be coming anytime soon.
... and the typical monitor seems to be 27" these days.
What would that be diagonally?
My only complaint is that it's not 8K. There's no such thing as too many pixels.
So, assuming he was talking about a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor (which he certainly was not -- he was talking 4:3 -- but I can't be bothered to do the math), a 40" wide monitor is actually a 46" monitor.
And a 27" monitor would be 23.5" wide.
Benefits:
* Fast. 2.5x faster (at least) than RAM when running at the same bandwidth because it does not need to be refreshed. This was proven by Intel's insanely expensive persistent Optanium memory. RAM requires an electronic refresh at least every 65ms or it loses its contents.
* Archival. Contents could last, with integrity, past a 1000 years.
* Massive. The goal isn't to replace RAM, but to replace hard disks. Since UltraRAM will be faster than RAM functional obsolescence immediately applies. Storage and memory become a single volume.
When UltraRAM does become available technologies dependent upon memory optimization and current storage innovation also achieve functional obsolescence for the first time in computer history, which includes database applications. Databases will essentially become a high level storage mechanism on top of faster lower level storage mechanisms like file systems.
Even Apple does this (not just on the Mac Pro, you can configure the Mac Studio for it too). On the PC side all AMD Threadrippers can support at least that much, as can the Intel i9. These aren't server-class CPUs that require ECC memory or anything exotic like that either. Normal consumer hardware.
On Amazon, they sell a 32x32GB package of ECC RAM for about $10k.
https://www.amazon.com/Adamanta-32x32GB-Upgrade-PC4-17000-Re...
Not sure if it is a compulsory part of the spec, and irrelevant for most laptops since laptops generally wouldn’t use DDR5, but use low-power DDR instead.
For most people, 8 GB has been plenty for 10 years now. For gaming, I'd recommend 16 GB, 32 GB if you play a heavily modded Cities: Skylines.
If you start in 1980 with 32K and then double it every two years, you get a reasonable approximation of the RAM of a desktop-class computer all the way until then.
You hit 8GB in 2016 and then the rule goes out of the window.
And he needed it because of his 2000" TV!
Damn middle click is too convenient and no one wants to close tabs because they might not find that one critical page again
And most of the things in the tabs don't meet the threshold for bookmarking them, because the overhead of maintaining bookmarks makes one want to only bookmark things that are used often.
Refreshing that RAM costs power and more RAM means more energy -- even if the memory is unused.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio/20-core-cpu-48...
Also, plenty of people were actually using computers with 100gb of ram in the late 90s. ASCI Red at Sandia had 1,212gb of ram in 1997. Blue Gene/L, which they were building when this song came out had 16,000gb of ram and was designed to be upgradeable to as much as 128,000gb - even much more if the node quantity were maxed as well.
It has been great being able to spin up VMs as needed, or keep hundreds of tabs open on Chrome and not have to worry about things getting bogged down. The only annoyance is that this also results in gigantic memory dumps if the system crashes...
(FWIW, I'm usually hovering around 20G just with browser tabs alone and no VMs running. Admittedly, I do use tabs as a way to organize work so having hundreds is common.)
Assuming bit flips happen at a fixed rate (cosmic rays whatnot), then wouldn't the likelihood only depend on the actual amount of memory used rather than the total capacity? Like, if a bit flips in unused RAM does it really matter... And used memory is used one way or the other so the flip would have happened anyways.
I think the bigger issue is outright RAM failures/errors are harder to diagnose. Like if I had a bad chip on one of the sticks, it would be harder to notice since the chance of hitting that error and crashing is much lower, so the system would seem to run fine most of the time. Doing memtest is rather annoyingly slow so I've only done it once after building the system to make sure none of the sticks were DOA.
On another note, for my NAS I do run ECC (4 x 8G DDR3) on a server board and over the course of about 7 years, I've had 1 stick fail in the form of consistently getting stuck bits (which are then corrected and reported) and have had about 3 or 4 spurious flips in total on the other sticks.
My company made the mistake of ordering 8GB M1 MacBook Pros for everyone. After all ... they say "Pro", right? Truly the worst computer I've ever used, all because of memory management (and M1s unique memory-sharing architecture).
Even simple tasks like opening a new tab or switching windows showed serious lag. I could not run my local dev server and listen to music at the same time.
We eventually just said "screw it" and bought all new 16GB MacBook Airs. 1000x better.
Seeing that from one of the poorer countries, you guys really do have too much money.
That 8gb though. I had to switch to one when my last macbook died. I could develop on it fine, but chrome and teams killed me. Especially teams where it's just now getting a native release. There's no reason a lot of apps are using as much memory as they do. 8gb _should_ be more than fine for any office worker.
I'm growing on the idea that developers shouldn't be getting massive amounts of memory in their machines, so they can feel any pain their users will.
Home machines are typically consuming rather than producing stuff, so it seems reasonable that the RAM hasn't leapt ahead, since typical workloads aren't memory bound.
Now almost all upgrades are to make it better, not make it work at all.
The reason the sticks aren't larger seems to be because they had trouble scaling down the DRAM memory cells[1] since about 2016.
DRAM works, as you might know, by letting a capacitor hold a charge (or not).
This ability is a function of the geometry of the capacitor: the area of the anode and cathode, as well as the distance between them. Leakage current discharges the capacitor, hence why DRAM needs to be periodically refreshed, the industry settled on 64ms retention time per cell[2]. Leakage current tends to go up when the features shrink, due to there being less insulation between the conductors.
As mentioned in [1] it seems things are about to change, so perhaps we'll see much larger sticks in the near future.
If you were thinking of slots, I think that's more economics and feasibility. The Threadripper motherboards had 8 slots[3], since the CPU supported it, but they were quite expensive compared to regular Ryzen motherboards. It also requires a lot more power, so forget having that in laptops. And the slots take up space, so was only for the full ATX size[4].
[1]: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram...
[2]: https://www.csl.cornell.edu/~martinez/doc/isca13-mukundan.pd...
I'd estimate I'm around 50-60, so I'm sure plenty of HNers are over 100 total?
I just put together a new Framework laptop with 64GiB, and that was a huge jump from my Dell XPS 13 with 16GiB. All of the other 13" laptops I looked at max out at either 16GiB or 32GiB. Even 15"/16" laptops probably usually only have 16GiB or 32GiB, on average, though I'm sure there are some with 64GiB.
And then phones, even the high end ones max out at around 8GiB, right? I think mine has 6GiB, though it's a few years old now.
Even someone with a desktop machine (for gaming, perhaps) probably "only" has 64GiB. So the total (64GiB desktop + 16GiB laptop + 8GiB phone = 88GiB) is still under 100GiB. I guess if we include the dedicated VRAM on a the discrete GPU that might be in the desktop? Not sure I'd count that, though.
I do have a few Raspberry Pis (of various vintage) and an old Mac Mini that are doing various things around the house, so I guess that's another 4+4+1+0.5+16 = 25.5GiB. So my grand total (including my phone and laptop; I don't have a desktop) comes to 97.5GiB -- so close!
I wouldn't count these, but my router has 2GiB, and I have two APs with 128MiB each, so that'd bring me to 99.75GiB. Can't believe I'm only 256MiB short!
Please no. The pressure on us software developers to keep our bloat under control, particularly when better options than Electron become available, has to come from somewhere. There will always be people who can't afford to upgrade to the new baseline, and we shouldn't leave them behind if we can help it.
Writing UIs in TypeScript with React is amazingly productive. A huge amount of effort has been invested into making that entire stack fast and it’s still a lot slower than I‘d want it to be. I’ve written some websites in Yew (react-like rust library), but either Rust or Yew seems to really suck for UI stuff. I feel like we’re missing some kind of nice middle-of-the-road language that’s both reasonably productive and results in reasonably performant apps. OCaml is the only language I know of that’s in that sweet spot, but there’s no UI libraries for it unless you go the ReasonML/react route, but then you’re just compiling to JS again.
It used to incredibly painful to run out of ram. You’d have to hit swap or page a file in from disk that was tossed and wait hundreds of milliseconds. That was incredibly noticeable.
But now we can get things into memory so much faster having to load something off permanent storage takes a few tens of milliseconds. It’s not so objectionable.
At the same time most people are doing similar things to 20 years ago, needs haven’t scaled. Sure needs have gone up as images have gotten sharper but text is still text. Audio is still only a meg or two a minute. Unless you’re doing high end photo editing, video editing, or neural net stuff (which is mostly GPU memory?) do most people really need much more than 8/16GB?
The Air had no cooling and an underpowered little CPU so low power Apple had Intel make it just for them.
But you could pay a crazy amount of money for a teeny-tiny SSD instead of a tiny hard drive.
The SSD was so much faster than standard hard drives that machine could compile code faster than the normal MacBook Pros of the day, even though they could hold more ram and had better CPUs.
Gettin go things off disk to the CPU matters a lot. It’s OK if you don’t have enough memory if that pipeline is extremely fast.
The situation may have happened again with the M1 Macs. Not only were they faster than the Intel chips at most things but the on-package memory screams and the storage controller is fantastic.
People have reported those machines at 16GB anecdotally feeling amazing despite having half the ram of other existing machines.
It wasn't that things stopped improving, it is that the old measure of improvement has been de-emphasized in favor of other factors that have proved to be more important for normal use.
Actually it is not very true, in the mid 2000 4 GB was standard and now 16GB is more or less standard.
But, RAM has increased in price A LOT around 2011 when there was a RAM production crisis.
"After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, there was a severe chip shortage of NAND memory and displays."
mid 2000 4 GB was standard
[1] https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/06/07/cost-of-a-co...
For applications that are moving more bytes from drives to memory, this means we need to wait for the transfer and we end up preferring to delegate these applications to the cloud instead of running on our own machine, because servers are where the ram is increasing and abundant.
So basically we are doing a lot more big ram computation elsewhere and doing small ram computation on our desktop
An entry Level laptop now comes with 16 GB. Scaling is just not as fast because with RAM either has sweet spots and swapping is much faster with SSDs. To be quite honest if you interpret his lyrics the people with lots of ram are Prosumers or professionals which can get 100gb of ram or more it’s not just about the SOCs
"I got me a hundred gigabytes of ram" flows better lyrically in the song than "I got me a hundred-twenty-eight gigabytes of ram".
Whether he knew the details of typical memory module sizes or not, it's such a minor inaccuracy that the lyrical flow matters far more.
Anyway, I bet you could achieve it if you really wanted to try. Get a dell poweredge server with 24 DIMMs, install 12x8GB (96) + 4x1GB (4) for your total of 100, and with 8 DIMMs leftover.
What normal users don't use browsers?
“The first, and most obvious reason, was that the song was supposed to be a bit silly!”
+5 insightful.
Firefox recently introduced the most retarded feature ever.. Unloading tabs, that breaks javascript applications and gives an unreasonably bad experience.. I disabled it, but it keeps changing back to being enabled.. I have 128 gib of memory in this machine.. I don't care if firefox uses 10 or 20 of them..
It's 2022, it's sort of ridiculous that we still even have memory tiers..
I want my on-die 16 TiB nonvolatile RAM, and I want it two years ago!
It's mostly a filesystem problem, not a hardware problem.
The reason it was a problem on spinning disks, was that the delay in getting the next bit of data highly depended on where it was relative to the previous bit. With SSDs (as I understand it) looking up any bit of data is (just about?) independent of where it is located.
So, it's still a thing - but the cure (involving lots of wear) is a lot worse than the disease now.
If the file is fragmented, this may require more reads than if it's contiguous and uses an extent.
Exact scheme is filesystem-specific.
So the problem getting orders of magnitude smaller while the costs of the cure increasing a lot swung the equation away from defragging being a good thing overall.
It takes time for the read arms to move back and forth to literally read the data on the sector indicated by the master record file, and defragmenting the drive helped minimize that by moving the files around to be a linearly arranged as physically possible given the sophistication of the given system.
SSDs also have a similar master record file, indicating where all of the bits of the files are located on the flash memory in the hard drive, but since it makes at most the most atomically minute difference in seek times for the controller to read the data from those sectors (since there is no seek arm that has to physically move to the physical location nor any delay waiting for the spin of the disk to reach the correct location for the data read to begin) then file "fragmentation" has the most negligibly minuscule impact on file read speeds or drive performance, and given the dramatic increase in destructive writes that a file defragmentation would cause on an SSD, it should be avoided under any regular usage.
People use the same filesystems on HDD and SSD drives.
Fragmented files still require more blocks to say where the various parts are.
Yes, this is exactly what I said.
People use the same filesystems on HDD and SSD drives.
Yes, of course, but I'm not talking about filesystems but the reasoning behind why fragmentation matters on Hard Drives and not SSDs.
Fragmented files still require more blocks to say where the various parts are.
I don't have a comparison file to review, but in all measurable and tangible matters, this point is moot as it does not impact SSD performance, only Hard Disk performance is affected by fragmentation.
An SSD needs so close to the same amount of time to read a linear file compared to a fragmented file that the difference is imperceptible. 0.1ms per seek, less than 1/1000th of what you are claiming.
To directly copy from Crucial's website:
Should I defrag my SSD?
The short answer is this: you don't have to defrag an SSD.
To understand why, we first need to look at the purpose of defragmenting a drive. Defragging ensures that large files are stored in one continuous area of a hard disk drive so that the file can be read in one go. Mechanical drives have a relatively long seek time of approximately 15ms, so every time a file is fragmented you lose 15ms finding the next one. This really adds up when reading lots of different files split into lots of different fragments.
However, this isn't an issue with SSDs because the seek time are about 0.1ms. You won’t really notice the benefit of defragged files — which means there is no performance advantage to defragging an SSD.
SSDs move data that's already on your disk to other places on your disk, often sticking it at a temporary position first. That's what gives defragmenting a disadvantage for SSD users. You’re writing data you already have, which uses up some of the NAND's limited rewrite capability. So, you get no performance advantage whatsoever, but you are using up some of the limited rewrite capability.
https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/should-you-defrag...
I never claimed that you should defragment your SSD, I just pointed out that fragmentation is still an issue on SSDs, which is a true fact.
Reading a large fragmented file can be 30% slower than if it is not fragmented. Now if you don't think that's significant, you're just silly.
I was able to find a page that talked about write amplification and read speeds decreasing when files are overly fragmented on SSDs, but that was 7 years ago and technologies have improved dramatically since then, not to mention that the effect was found in files split into four hundred thousand pieces, which indicates the slowdown may have been more on the in-drive ASIC not having the throughput needed to deal with that many fragments than with the actual read/write of the disk itself.
https://www.overclock.net/threads/yes-file-system-fragmentat...
Where's your recent (last 4 years) paper or article that indicates that file fragmentation has anything more than a negligible affect on read/write speeds in an ssd?
If you can't put up, then nothing you say matters.
This is pure logic, no need for any experiment or benchmark.
Fragmented files require reading more blocks. The exact scheme depends on the filesystem used. The 30% figure came from an estimation of the ext4 worst case vs best case of number of reads needed.
But a random block may take many many times that as it repositions the head and waits for the block to come spinning by.
And an SSD returns any block almost at the same speed, so defragmenting only increases the amount of wear on the drive (and it internally remaps anyway so you don’t even get what you’re after - block 5 is a logical block that may be currently mapped to 466 not next to block 6).
Searching Google for “weird ai” just returns “weird Al” results heh
That 'i' is silly. As is the one in "GiB."
Yes, in the past the SI prefixes were "abused" for power-of-two quantities, but nowadays it's best to be more precise, as many computer-related things actually do come in power-of-ten quantities, not just power-of-two quantities. For example, my NVMe drive's capacity is actually 2TB, not 2TiB[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
[1] Ok, ok, it's actually showing up in `parted` as 2,000,398,934,016 bytes, which is a little bit more (~380MiB) than 2TB, but considerably less (~185GiB) than 2TiB.
They don't have to do this, they do it because it confuses people.
My gaming desktop only has 16GB of RAM. It's the fastest DDR4 that my motherboard will support, granted, but all of the games I play on it are CPU or GPU bound. Additional RAM isn't going to significantly help anything.