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Comment by doubled112 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I keep saying to people "it doesn't matter, everything is fast now".

Gigabit fibre to the home, NVMe that is way faster than RAM was not that long ago, CPUs in phones that make old desktops look like toasters.

The disconnect is that the numbers feel huge in comparison, and what my computer can do for me really, is not hugely different.

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That kind of reads like a sarcastic post. The us has so much terrible internet. I'm about to try trip channel bonding starlink, dsl, and an lte internet connection. Starlink and dsl drop packets a lot.

I'm in the us, pay $100 a month to get 5 mbit dsl. This is not in a big city though, 20 miles outside of a city, next to a highway. There's fiber that runs by the street at the small subdivision this is in, kind of in the woods. The company that owns it refuses to connect us to fiber, instead preferring to put 100 homes on 5mbit dsl at far more profit. There's one big commerical user that paid for the fiber. This is the story of the us of course, I'm not unique. A family member lives on the other side of the country, he's closer to a big city but has the same problem.

The important thing is you kept those damn socialists out of your country and let good old American free market forces solve the problem.

Lets all keep in mind that a very small portion of the global population has access to this. It is our responsibility to bring all of humanity forward with us as we write software.

https://perfnow.nl/speakers#alex

While you're not wrong about the portions who can access it, I wonder at how many of us doing work that brings humanity forward at all. Sure, let's not use fast system as an excuse for bad code, but I'm not going to pretend my CRUD app is elevating humanity. Even the stuff that claims to feels like at best a lateral move a lot of the time.

Seems like we'll start using NVMe as RAM, so we'll be able to have higher RAM sizes

It's called swap.

Could we go full circle and use that for a RAM disk?

IIRC tmpfs already does that, by swapping to disk.

Conceptually? yes, but I meant using NVMe fully as RAM, without your RAM sticks.

Isn't the issue endurance? I'm pretty sure your drive would die before the year is over. Probably a month or two.

Latency would be significant as well

Endurance may surprise you, but then again - I haven't paid much attention to newer (cheaper/weaker/more dense) NAND types

Isn't NVMe storage much higher latency than RAM, which is no good for the CPU? IIRC, NVMe is also poor at random access.

Yup.

Now Optane on the other hand...

Just found out Intel killed Optane (announced 2nd Aug 2022) :-(

Yes, but certain models are on a fire sale now, keep an eye on Newegg!

> NVMe that is way faster than RAM was not that long ago

Citation?

DDR2-1066 was pretty rare (fast), and rated as PC2-8500, meaning 8.5GBps. DDR3 started here-about, in ~2007.

Consumer PCIe 5.0 ssds will in some cases likely surpass that.

DDR2-800 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 6,400 MB/s, and was in common use well after 2010.

Depends on what you consider a long time, maybe.

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...

> Sequential read/write speeds up to 7,450/6,900 MB/s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM

Lists DDR2-400 capable of 3200 MB/s of throughput.

Yeah, but there's a random in RAM and SSDs aren't that great yet.

Not to mention deletes/overwrites.

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