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> hopes this pushes Microsoft to at least create a low ram mode

Windows OS and Surface (CoPilot AI-optimized) hardware have been combined in the "Windows + Devices" division.

> We don't *need* more ram

RAM and SSDs both use memory wafers and are equally affected by wafer hoarding, strategic supply reductions and market price manipulation.

Nvidia is re-inventing Optane for AI storage with higher IOPS, and paid $20B for Groq LPUs using SRAM for high memory bandwidth.

The architectural road ahead has tiers of memory, storage and high-speed networking, which could benefit AI & many other workloads. How will industry use the "peace dividend" of the AI wars? https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/08/30/the-peace-d...

  The rapid growth of the mobile market in the late 2000s and early 2010s led to a burst of technological progress..  core technologies like GPS, cameras, microprocessors, batteries, sensors and memory became dramatically cheaper, smaller and better-performing.. This wave of innovation has had tremendous second-order impacts on the economy. Over the past decade, these technologies have spilled over from the smartphone market to transform industries from satellites to wearables, from drones to electric vehicles.

> RAM and SSDs both use NAND flash and are equally affected by wafer hoarding, strategic supply reductions and market price manipulation.

Why on earth you think RAM uses NAND flash ?

Sorry, still editing long comment, s/NAND flash/memory wafers/.

> Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use

Browsing web requires more and more RAM each year but I don't think browsers are the main reason - sites use more and more JS code. With a hard cap many sites will stop working. Software bloat is a natural tendency, the path of least resistance. Trimming weigh requires a significant effort and in case of web - a coordinated effort. I don't believe it could happen unless Google (having a browser with >60% market share) will force this but Google own sites are among worst offenders in term of hardware requirements.

> I was only using 6GBs of ram.

Insane that this is seen as "better software". I could do basically the same functionality in 2000 with 512mb. I assume this is because everything runs through chrome with dozens more layers of abstraction but

More like 128MB.

512MB in 2000 was like HEDT level (though I'm not sure that acronym existed back then)

512MB weren't that odd for multimedia from 2002, barely a few years later. By 2002 256MB of RAM were the standard, almost a new low-end PC.

64MB = w98se OK, XP will swap a lot on high load, nixlikes really fast with fvwm/wmaker and the like. KDE3 needs 128MB to run well, so get a bit down. No issues with old XFCE releases. Mozilla will crawl, other browsers will run fine.

128MB = w98se really well, XP willl run fine, SP2-3 will lag. Nixlikes will fly with wmaker/icewm/fvwm/blackbox and the like. Good enough for mozilla.

192MB = Really decent for a full KDE3 desktop or for Windows XP with real life speeds.

256MB = Like having 8GB today for Windows 10, Gnome 3 or Plasma 6. Yes, you can run then with 2GB and ZRAM, but, realistically, and for the modern bloated tools, 8GB for a 1080p desktop it's mandatory. Even with UBlock Origin for the browser. Ditto back in the day. With 256MB XP and KDE3 flied and they ran much faster than even Win98 with 192MB of RAM.

Win10 can work with 8GB DDR4 RAM.

Win11, on the other hand, meh..

Though Win10 will stop getting updates, but M$ is mistaken if it thinks it can force customers to switch to more expensive, buggy, bad performance Win11.

That's why I switched to Linux for my old PC (a cute little Sony Viao), though it worked well with Win10. Especially after I upgraded it to an 1TB SATA SSD (since even old SATA1.0 socket works with newer SATA SSDs, as SATA interface is backward compatible; it felt awesome to see a new SSD work perfectly in a 15years old laptop), some additional RAM (24GB (8+16) - 16GB repurposed from another PC), and a new battery (from Amazon - it was simply plug and play - simply eject the old battery from its slot and plug in the new battery).

I find it refreshing to see how easy it was to upgrade old PCs, I think manufacturers are deliberately making it harder to repair devices, especially mobile phones. That's why EU and India were forced to mandate the Right to Repair.

You're right. I thought I was misremembering....

Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.

I was being lazy, but optimized I guess I could get down to 4GB of ram.

> Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use.

You can already do this. For example, I use `systemd-run` to run browsers with CPU quotas applied. Firefox gets 400% CPU (i.e. up to 4 cores), and no more.

Example command: systemd-run --user --scope -p CPUQuota=400% firefox

You can impose CPU restrictions in Windows 10 or 11 too...

You can limit CPU usage for a program in Windows by adjusting the "Maximum processor state" in the power options to a lower percentage, such as 80%. Additionally, you can set the program's CPU affinity in Task Manager. Please note this will only affect the process scheduling.

You can also use a free tool like Process Lasso or BES to limit the CPU for a Windows application. You can use a free tools like HWInfo, SysInternals (ProcMon, SysMom, ProcDump) to monitor and check for CPU usage, especially to investigate CPU spikes caused by rogue (malware or poor performance) apps.

CPU affinity? I haven't been able to change priority in task manager since window 8 i think. Cpu affinity seems only to allow which cores get assigned...not really good management.

Process Lasso worked for me few years back when I needed to do CPU cores restriction for an old program.

Yeah I'm sure that will happen, just like prices will go back down when the stupid tariffs are gone.

That's not happening though, hence why we need more ram.

Eh? As I see it, we've got options.

Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required

Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past.

Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one where the Ballchinians are friendly)

---

To evaluate these in no particular order:

Option B doesn't sound very fruitful. I mean: It can be fun to wish, but magical thinking doesn't usually get very far.

Option C sounds fun, but my time-bender got roached after the last jump and the version of Costco we have here doesn't sell them. (Maybe someone else has a working one, but they seem to be pretty rare here.)

That leaves option A: Optimize the software once, and duplicate that optimized software to whomever it is useful using that "Internet" thing that the cool kids were talking about back in the 1980s.

There is plenty of well optimised software out there already, hopefully a ram shortage can encourage people to seek it out. Would be nice if there were some well curated lists of apps. Sort of like suckless but perhaps a little less extreme. A long standing problem in the software industry is developers havein insanely overspecced machines and fat interne popes leading to performance issues going unnoticed by the people that should be fixing them. The claim that they the need that power to run their their code editor and compiler is really only a need for a code editors and compilers that suck less. I've always ran a 10 year old machine (I'm cheap) and had the expectation that my debug builds run acceptably fast!