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Comment by aappleby | Hacker News Reader

I predict we will see compute-in-flash before we see cheap laptops with 128+ gigs of ram.

There was a company that did compute-in-dram, which was recently acquired by Qualcomm: https://www.emergentmind.com/topics/upmem-pim-system

You could get 128gb ram laptops from the time ddr4 came around: workstation class laptops with 4 ram slots would happily take 128gb of memory.

The fact that nowadays there are little to no laptops with 4 ran slots is entirely artificial.

I was mussing this summer if I should get a refurbed Thinkpad P16 with 96GB of RAM to run VMs purely in memory. Now that 96GB of ram cost as much as a second P16.

I feel you, so much. I was thinking of getting a second 64gb node for my homelab and i thought i’d save those money… now the ram alone cost as much as the node, and I’m crying.

Lesson learned: you should always listen to that voice inside your head that say: “but i need it…” lol

I rebuilt a workstation after a failed motherboard a year ago. I was not very excited about being forced to replace it on a days notice and cheaped out on the RAM (only got 32GB). This is like the third or fourth time I've taught myself the lesson to not pinch pennies when buying equipment/infrastructure assets. It's the second time the lesson was about RAM, so clearly I'm a slow learner.

You probably had paged out the lesson to slow storage… you should get more ram :p

I can't tell if this is optimism for compute-in-flash or pessimism with how RAM has been going lately!

The thing that is supposed to happen next is high-bandwidth flash. In theory, it could allow laptops to run the larger models without being extortionately costly, by loading directly from flash into the GPU (not by executing in flash) But I haven't seen figures of the actual bandwidth yet, and no doubt to start with it will be expensive. The underlying technology of flash has much higher read latency than dram, so it's not really clear (to me, at least) if they can deliver the speeds needed to remove the need to cache in VRAM just by increasing parallelism.

We’ve had “compute in flash” for a few years now: https://mythic.ai/product/

Yeah especially since what is happening in the memory market

Feast and famine.

In three years we will be swimming in more ram than we know what to do with.

Kind of feel that's already the case today... 4GB I find is still plenty for even business workloads.

Video games have driven the need for hardware more than office work. Sadly games are already being scaled back and more time is being spent on optimization instead of content since consumers can't be expected to have the kind of RAM available they normally would and everyone will be forced to make do with whatever RAM they have for a long time.

That might not be the case. The kind of memory that will flood the second-hand market could not be the kind of memory we can stuff in laptops or even desktop systems.

Memristors are (IME) missing from the news. They promised to act as both persistent storage and fast RAM.

If only memristors weren't vaporware that has "shown promise" for 3 decades now and went nowhere.

By "we" do you mean consumers? No, "we" will get neither. This is unexpected, irresistable opportunity to create a new class, by controlling the technology that people are required and are desiring to use (large genAI) with a comprehensive moat — financial, legislative and technological. Why make affordable devices that enable at least partial autonomy? Of course the focus will be on better remote operation (networking, on-device secure computation, advancing narrative that equates local computation with extremism and sociopathy).

Push Washington to grill the foundries and their customers. Repeat until prices drop.

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