[HN Gopher] Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM ___________________________________________________________________ Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM Author : Tomte Score : 141 points Date : 2022-09-06 09:34 UTC (13 hours ago) (HTM) web link (rubenerd.com) (TXT) w3m dump (rubenerd.com) | ollien wrote: | > 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? | | 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... | malfist wrote: | I wonder if something like vista is needed to move the needle | on consumer RAM again. Pre-vista, windows required 64MB of RAM, | and you could fudge it a bit even lower if you knew what you | were doing. Vista _required_ 1GB of RAM, and recommended 2. | | 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. | hnuser123456 wrote: | Hm... I had a Celeron machine running XP ~2004-2007 that had | 512MB of RAM, and it wasn't hard to run out, eventually | upgraded to 768MB but I was still jealous of my friend | running XP with 1GB. | | 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. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | > Today, windows 11 requires 4GB or ram | | That's gotta be painful, though, unless you only ever use a | single browser tab. | anthk wrote: | A bit of bullshit. Ublock Origin, | git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters, enable that config to | either Firefox or Chrom* based browsers. Under Windows you | can set he env vars properly to the desktop shortcuts as | pure arguments for the exe. Seriously, I tried with > 10yo | Celeron netbook and it was perfectly usable once you set up | ZRAM/zswap and Ublock Origin. Oh, and some tweaks on | about:flags to force the GL acceleration. OpenGL 2.1 | capable, go figure, and yet browsing it's snappy on the | Celeron. | NovaVeles wrote: | That may be the case but the question is, what big change to | the end user could they pitch to justify such a leap in the | requirements? | RajT88 wrote: | 32gb is totally worthwhile. I don't know if I need 32gb | exactly, but I desperately needed more than 16gb. | waynesonfire wrote: | at least on linux, any unused ram is going to be used for | your buffer cache. get as much memory as you can afford. | itronitron wrote: | 256GB of RAM has its uses. I'd rather go with that than having | to fiddle with a 'distributed system' that requires another | level of care and feeding. | BoorishBears wrote: | Does it though? I made another comment but for home use I | can't even max out 64 GBs. | | 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 | erulabs wrote: | My primary workstation has 128GB and it is _for sure_ | unnecessary. Even with multiple projects running each of which | spins up a dozen containers in k3s, and a background game of | Rimworld as well as all the electron apps that life requires | these days, I rarely ever breach 64GB much less 100GB. | | The _only_ real use is writing horrifying malloc experiments | and having a couple extra seconds to kill them before OOMing. | TillE wrote: | Containers are relatively resource-efficient; if you need to | run a bunch of actual VMs for testing (eg, Windows), you can | easily find ways to use 128GB. | inciampati wrote: | I routinely use this much RAM for work. And it's not malloc | experiments lol. I need 200ag to 500G for my research work. | Most of our systems have 384G and this is just enough. If I | could only have a laptop with that much... | gambiting wrote: | I work in video games development and all our workstations | have 128GB of ram - I consider that the bare minimum | nowadays. | dimensionc132 wrote: | Weird" Al Yankovic - Amish Paradise is a better song about | technology | | https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg | jl6 wrote: | It took Weird Al a further 7 years to perfect the tech diss | track: | | https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-white-and-nerdy-lyrics | thegagne wrote: | I think a big piece that is ignored is how much normal | compute/memory usage has been shifted to the Cloud. | | 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. | thriftwy wrote: | Yes - you can effortlessly lease a 128G RAM cloud VM today if | you need one. I distinctly remember that in 2010 8G server was | "big box" whereas in 2013 having 32G became commonplace. That's | the RAM saturation point. | z0r wrote: | I need >16GB of RAM to reasonably run Chrome on a personal | computer. | digitallyfree wrote: | How many tabs do you have open? Typically that's only | necessary if you like have 100+ tabs open or are running many | demanding web apps at the same time. | BoorishBears wrote: | I somewhat jokingly built out my gaming PC with 64 GBs of RAM | with Chrome as my justification... unfortunately well before | it reaches even 16 GBs of RAM usage it becomes fairly | unstable before eventually reporting that it's out of memory | despite less than 50% memory utilization. | brundolf wrote: | I just did a test, checking RAM usage before/after closing | Chrome (which has 8 tabs open, three of which are Google apps | and three of which are Jira, so pretty heavyweight). It's | using 2.8GB | vlunkr wrote: | Unless you have some extreme circumstances, like a plugin | that's leaking memory or 100s of tabs, I really really doubt | that. | coldtea wrote: | > _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._ | | 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... | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Yes but what Slack does and ICQ didn't is justify a monthly | subscription, so it's an improvement you see. | LeoPanthera wrote: | Moores law held for RAM until about 2016. | | 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. | w-m wrote: | Commercialization of large machine learning models might push the | RAM game for the end user up in the not-too-far future. For | unified memory machines like the current Apple chips that is, and | otherwise the memory on consumer GPUs for the enthusiasts. | | 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. | nocman wrote: | Of course, the other plausible explanation is that (at least at | the time) Weird Al didn't know the difference between RAM and | hard drive space (especially likely, because he's talking about | defragging a hard drive). In fact, I'd be surprised if that _wasn | 't_ what he meant. I will, however, leave room for him knowing | the difference, but intentionally being absurd (it _is_ Weird Al, | after all). | | 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 | dreamcompiler wrote: | It's really not the users' fault. Most civilians understand | that computers have to have some way to "remember" their files, | but the fact that computers also need memory that "forgets" if | the power goes off makes no sense to them. | | 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. | mwcampbell wrote: | My understanding is that the problems with Optane were a lot | more complicated than that. @bcantrill and others talked | about this on an episode of their Oxide and Friends Twitter | space a few weeks ago. A written summary would be nice. | thaumasiotes wrote: | > Most civilians understand that computers have to have some | way to "remember" their files, but the fact that computers | also need memory that "forgets" if the power goes off makes | no sense to them. | | 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. | Miraste wrote: | It would take serious software changes before that became a | benefit. If every unoptimized Electron app (but I repeat | myself) were writing its memory leaks straight to permanent | storage my computer would never work again. | thaumasiotes wrote: | > I will, however, leave room for him knowing the difference, | but intentionally being absurd (it is Weird Al, after all). | | 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 | | The line about having 100 gigabytes of RAM is completely in | keeping with every other part of the song. There's no more | reason to think Weird Al might _not_ have known what RAM was | than there is reason to believe he didn 't know that having | Bill Gates do your tech support was unrealistic, or that PCs | are rarely upgraded more than once a day. | nocman wrote: | > There's no more reason to think Weird Al might not have | known what RAM was than there is reason to believe he didn't | know that having Bill Gates do your tech support was | unrealistic | | 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). | function_seven wrote: | See also "Wi-Fi" meaning _any_ Internet access now. Or "screen | saver" meaning the desktop wallpaper. | hosteur wrote: | Huh? I have never encountered those. | dspillett wrote: | I've certainly heard both. | | 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. | madamelic wrote: | My favorite one was somewhere on Reddit where someone | bought a house and was asking how to rip out the Ethernet | so they could install Wi-Fi. | | Thankfully everyone was like "NO. Don't do that, here's how | to install a wireless router to your ethernet setup" | sp332 wrote: | There was an incident years ago with a library offering | wired Ethernet for laptops, and the sign said "wired wifi | connection". I'm not sure it's really that common. | naniwaduni wrote: | wifi but the wi stands for wired | xen2xen1 wrote: | My children complain the wifi is down when their ethernet | cable is broken. They say that AFTER THEY TELL ME IT'S | BROKEN. This is not just a meme, they should know better, | and are very unhappy on WiFi, but still tend to call all | internet Wi-Fi. | LeoPanthera wrote: | I have. Often. It's probably not common in tech circles but | "desktop", "wallpaper", and "screen saver" are often used | interchangeably. | | "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. | darkerside wrote: | I'm clear on the first set but will cop to not having | thought much about which of those is which in the second | set. | treeman79 wrote: | Internet is down! Umm no it's fine. Shows me Facebook not | working. Umm that's just Facebook down. So the internet is | down! | | After a few rounds sure. The entire Internet is down. I'm | going to go play an online game. | bdowling wrote: | The rest of the lyrics make it clear that Weird Al knows | _exactly_ what he 's talking about. | | https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-its-all-about-the-penti... | nocman wrote: | Maybe so, but I don't see anything in the lyrics that could | not be taken from a friend who's "really good with | computers". | | 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. | sterlind wrote: | yeah, the Usenet reference had to have been obscure even back | then. and beta-testing OSes back then would been.. what? | Windows Neptune and Copeland? | bena wrote: | Those lines are separate lines of separate couplets. | | 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. | nocman wrote: | Yeah, I guess it depends on whether you interpret them as | separate. | | 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. | qzw wrote: | I'm going to have to stan for Weird Al here and say that | there's basically 0% chance that he didn't know the difference | between RAM and hard drive space. He's actually quite | meticulous in his songwriting and pays a lot of attention to | details. And with a mostly (white and) nerdy (ba-dum-tssshhh!) | audience he knows he'd never hear the end of it if he screws | up. Must be quite the motivator to get things right. | nocman wrote: | Just to be clear, I did not in any way mean this as | disparaging toward Weird Al. I've been a fan of his music for | decades. | | 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. | goatcode wrote: | >MiB | | That 'i' is silly. As is the one in "GiB." | [deleted] | m2fkxy wrote: | why? how else do you designate binary prefixes? | Kwpolska wrote: | Windows (and most of the world) doesn't bother, 1 KB = 1024 | B. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p= | 17... | icedchai wrote: | If you've been in computing since, say, the 90's, you don't. | It was always based on context. Memory = binary, bandwidth = | decimal, disk/SSD storage = decimal (maybe!) | kelnos wrote: | They're binary prefixes[0]. If we go by the traditional meaning | of the SI prefixes, "M" means "10^6", so 1MB is 1,000,000 | bytes. 1MiB, by contrast, is 1,048,576 bytes (1024*1024, or | 2^20), which would be more correct for something like RAM. | | 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. | pessimizer wrote: | > many computer-related things actually do come in power-of- | ten quantities | | They don't have to do this, they do it _because_ it confuses | people. | obblekk wrote: | Interesting point that RAM has basically not moved up in consumer | computers in 10+ years... wonder why. | | 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? | acchow wrote: | > Interesting point that RAM has basically not moved up in | consumer computers in 10+ years... wonder why. | | Smartphones gradually became the limiting factor | bombcar wrote: | RAM prices haven't dropped as fast as other parts, images don't | ever really get much "bigger" (this drove a lot of early memory | jumps, because as monitor sizes grew, so did the RAM necessary | to hold the video image, and image file sizes also grew to | "look good" - the last jump we had here was retina). | | 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. | dale_glass wrote: | I think it's just RAM reaching the comfortable level, like | other things did. | | 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). | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | > Drawing a game at a decent framerate at 320x200 required | careful coding. | | 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. | seiferteric wrote: | For most users that is true. I think there were several | applications that drove the demand for more memory, then the | 32bit -> 64bit transition drove it further but now for most | users 16GB is plenty. | drdaeman wrote: | 16 GB RAM is above average. I've just opened BestBuy (US, | WA, and I'm not logged in so it picked some store in | Seattle - YMMV), went to the "All Laptops" section (no | filters of any kind) and here's what I get on the first | page: 16, 8, 12, 8, 12, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 16, 4, | 4, 8. Median value is obviously 8 and mean/average is 8.4. | | 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. | inciampati wrote: | 16G is just enough that I only get two or three OOM kills a | day. So, it's pathetically low for my usage, but I can't | upgrade because it's all soldered on now! 64G or 128G seems | like it would be enough to not run into problems. | brundolf wrote: | What are you doing where you're having OOM kills? I think | the only time that's ever happened to me on a desktop | computer (or laptop) was when I accidentally generated an | enormous mesh in Blender | wardedVibe wrote: | As someone on a desktop with 64GB, firefox still manages to | slowly rise in usage up to around 40% of RAM, occasionally | causing oom issues. | mixmastamyk wrote: | FF using 1GB here, after several hours. You must have a | leak somewhere. | detaro wrote: | How many windows/tabs is a much more relevant question in | my experience. | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | FF doesn't load old tabs so you can't just count them if | they've been carried over since a restart. | detaro wrote: | true, active tabs matters, but people that have hundreds | of tabs open but only rarely open new ones or touch old | ones are probably also quite rare. | bentcorner wrote: | I also have 64GB on my home PC and Firefox tends to get | into bad states where it uses up a lot of RAM/CPU too. | Restarting it usually fixes things (with saved tabs so I | don't lose too much state). | | 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. | johnmaguire wrote: | I wonder if you have a runaway extension... I haven't | seen this type of issue from Firefox in a while. | yetanotherloser wrote: | Pretty sure 4 gig RAM was common consumer level then, but I | take your point. I think the average consumer user became | rather less affected by the benefits of increased RAM somewhere | around 8 and that let manufacturers get away with keeping on | turning out machines that size. Specialist software and common | OSes carried on getting better at using more if you had more | demanding tasks to do, which is probably quite a lot of the | people here, but not a high % of mass market computer buyers. | | 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) | [deleted] | icedchai wrote: | In 1995, I remember buying a Pentium PC with 32 megs of RAM. | Gigabytes of RAM wasn't common until the early 2000's! | NovaVeles wrote: | This is where it becomes apparent that the way I use my machine | is very different to some folks on here. | | 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. | zamadatix wrote: | Put Windows/MacOS on it and you'll use 3 GB just booting up | :p. | Syonyk wrote: | I don't think SSDs allowing rapid swapping is as big a deal as | SSDs being really fast at serving files. On a typical system, | pre-SSD, you wanted gobs of RAM to make it fast - not only for | your actual application use, but also for the page cache. You | wanted that glacial spinning rust to be touched _once_ for any | page you 'd be using frequently because the access times were | so awful. | | 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... | bombcar wrote: | Also people forget that the jump from 8 bit to 16 bit | _doubled_ address size, and 16 to 32 did it again, and 32 to | 64, again. But each time the percentage of "active memory" | that was used by addresses dropped. | | 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. | rep_lodsb wrote: | Memory addresses were never 8 bits. Some early hobbyist | machines might have had only 256 bytes of RAM present, but | the address space was always larger. | compiler-guy wrote: | Even the Intel 4004--widely regarded as the first | commercial microprocessor--had a 12-bit address space | antod wrote: | Yeah, the 8bit machines I used had 16bit address space. | For example from my vague/limited Z80 memories most of | the 8bit registers were paired - so if you wanted a 16bit | address, you used the pair. To lazy to look it up, but | with the Z80 I seem to remember about 7 8bit registers | and that allowed 3 pairs that could handle a 16bit value. | sdenton4 wrote: | I actually have 100GB of RAM in my desktop machine! It's | great, but my usage is pretty niche. I use it as drive space | to hold large ML datasets for super fast access. | | I think for most use cases ssd is fast enough though. | paulmd wrote: | > especially with NVMe, you don't have to read things | sequentially | | 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. | vlovich123 wrote: | Latency may be similar but: | | 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. | ajsnigrutin wrote: | 8gigs is "enough" for most people. | | 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). | lovehashbrowns wrote: | It was pretty difficult to use 64GB of RAM on my old desktop. | 95% of my usage was Firefox and the occasional game. The only | things that actually utilized that RAM were After Effects and | Cinema 4D, which I only use as a hobby. I felt kinda dumb | buying that much RAM up until I got into AE and Cinema 4D | because most of it just sat there unused. | adam_arthur wrote: | No background or industry specific knowledge, but I'd venture | to guess smart phones/mobile computing added a lot to the | demand for RAM and outpaced increases in manufacturing. | | I'd guess now that the market for smartphones is pretty mature | we should start seeing further RAM increases in the coming | years. | SECProto wrote: | > Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM | | And he needed it because of his 2000" TV! | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDostWXpcU | fsagx wrote: | No. It's all about the pentiums: | | https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos | NovaVeles wrote: | Yeah, that would do it. :D My work PC is currently using 8.4GB | with outlook, Excel and note pad open! | FreeFull wrote: | I wonder if another thing that's been holding larger amounts of | RAM back is the lack of error correction. Maybe DDR5 will | mitigate that problem, although it's still suboptimal that | consumer-targetted CPUs don't support ECC. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | No, what's "holding larger amounts back" is that it's not | needed by consumers. | | 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. | robocat wrote: | DDR5 supports on-die ECC eg. https://v6m6x4a4.rocketcdn.me/wp- | content/uploads/2020/04/SK_... | | 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. | toast0 wrote: | On-die ECC should help with data integrity, but on-die ECC | doesn't protect integrity all the way to the memory | controller, and lack of reporting means I don't think you'll | even know when there's an uncorrectable error. Which means | you've still got the same basic issue --- memory is not | stable, although the error rate is likely reduced. | jabbany wrote: | IDK, anecdotally at least I broke the 100G RAM barrier earlier | this year by upgrading to a Ryzen 5900X with 4 x 32G sticks. RAM | has largely become quite affordable with a 32G stick of DDR4 | going for around ~$100 (and you can occasionally see discounts | down to ~$80). | | 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.) | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Without ECC you've exploded your vulnerability to bit flips. | thanatos519 wrote: | He also got a flat screen monitor 40 inches wide! (I believe that | your says "Etch-A-Sketch" on the side) | | ... and the typical monitor seems to be 27" these days. | iancmceachern wrote: | I have a 40" monitor | jbellis wrote: | I tried using a 40" 4k tv as a monitor a few years ago. It was | big enough that I had to move my head to see different parts of | the screen. I didn't like that and now I'm back on around 30". | ak217 wrote: | LG makes a 43" 4K IPS monitor. It's the centerpiece to my | most productive setup, with a 27" in portrait mode serving as | a sidecar. | | My only complaint is that it's not 8K. There's no such thing | as too many pixels. | bombcar wrote: | And "Slackers" would have a whole new meaning these days. | JohnFen wrote: | But he was measuring the width of the monitor, which is not how | monitors and TVs are measured -- they're measured diagonally | across the screen. | | 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. | madmoose wrote: | Wait till you see Frank's 2000" TV! | timbit42 wrote: | > 40 inches wide | | What would that be diagonally? | ISL wrote: | Somewhere between 56.5" and 40". | mayoff wrote: | 46 inches at at 16:9 aspect ratio. | antidaily wrote: | Lost my virginity to that song. | slg wrote: | Isn't this just the same as processors? We used to primarily care | about GHz and GBs, but there were diminishing returns for | continuing to grow those. As a result, processors started | shifting to multiple cores, but still usually hovering in the | same GHz range. Meanwhile RAM total size might be the same in | your current machine as it was a decade ago, but bandwidth and | clock rates have drastically increased since Weird Al wrote that | song. A similar thing happens with digital cameras and | megapixels. | | 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. | monksy wrote: | Defragmentation isn't as big of an issue on SSDs, but trimming is | an issue. | smiley1437 wrote: | 8GB isn't quite enough anymore, even typical office employees are | starting to need 16GB now because of many browser tabs | | Damn middle click is too convenient and no one wants to close | tabs because they might not find that one critical page again | kitsunesoba wrote: | > 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. | lanstin wrote: | Google's lack of search quality affects hardware specs. Better | at answering general questions and less good at finding a | specific thing, especially from a few months ago. | throwaway0asd wrote: | Imagine the revolution when UltraRAM becomes common and | inexpensive. Then everybody can have terabytes of storage as | cheap as hard disks and faster than today's RAM. | | 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. | zamadatix wrote: | I'll take cheaper flash any day but when you start talking | about making RAM obsolete the metric will be latency not | bandwidth. I can already stick e.g. 4x PCIe 4 NVMe drives into | a x16 slot or a 64 into an AMD server and beat whatever the RAM | bandwidth and cost/GB will be it's just not very useful to do | so. | naniwaduni wrote: | So are we expecting UltraRAM to become commercially viable | before or after the Mill architecture? | dotdi wrote: | From a professional perspective, I completely agree. | | 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. | macrolime wrote: | 8GB ram is not enough to run any kind of modern web browser | anthk wrote: | In which universe? I can run up to 5 tabs well under an Atom | netbook with 1GB and some hosts bloking file. | | with 8GB and the Intel NUC own as a desktop (Alpine Linux | XFCE), with UBo I can open dozens of tabs without blinking. | happyopossum wrote: | That's demonstrably false - I can run Safari or Chrome on my | 8Gb M1 macbook air 24/7 without any issues. | vonseel wrote: | If they are unrelated to the work your team does, how can you | be sure they really need more than 8Gb of unified memory? | | 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. | entropie wrote: | Image or video editing? | [deleted] | mgaunard wrote: | I don't understand how defragmentation isn't an issue on SSDs. | | It's mostly a filesystem problem, not a hardware problem. | antod wrote: | There's a difference between something still existing and | something still being a 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. | paulkrush wrote: | I encourage you to google this. | zitterbewegung wrote: | My MacBook Pro M1 Max has 64 and an M2 Max will probably top out | at 96 if they use Samsungs new 12 GB LPDDR5. | | 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 | mwcampbell wrote: | > The general public isn't asking for a hundred gigs, but I'd | love to see the baseline rise up a bit. | | 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. | MBCook wrote: | Hasn't memory sped up dramatically in the last 20 years? Maybe | that, combined with ever faster SSDs, means most people just | don't need too much more. | | 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? | distantsounds wrote: | Yeah, this. we are still running our desktops at sub-5ghz | speeds, but we've gotten far more efficient at it. there are | more things to take in account. | MBCook wrote: | I remember when the first MacBook Air came out someone, I | think it was Jeff Atwood, posted about compile speeds. | | 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. | Veedrac wrote: | > But memory has felt like an exception to Moore's Law for a | while, at least in practice. | | 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. | EmuAGR wrote: | SRAM cells need 6 transistors. DRAM cells need a transistor and | a capacitor. | | 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... | ehayes wrote: | Old enough to remember upgrading the RAM in our home PC so we | could play Doom --quadrupled it to 4 megabytes. | Dwedit wrote: | On a related note, the computer from Mega Man X has 8192TB of | "real mem", 32768TB of "avail mem", and laughably small cache | sizes of 512KB, 768KB, and 32768KB. | jimt1234 wrote: | I wonder if Bill Gates still does Weird Al's tech support. | alfiedotwtf wrote: | "What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?" | fudged71 wrote: | Anyone else get stuck parsing the title whether it's Weird AI or | Weird Al? | DOsinga wrote: | Yep I did. I thought this was about some new network | architecture that needed loads of RAM but also produced, I | guess, weird results | bo1024 wrote: | My font (Firefox) was actually very helpful for this. A tiny | serif at the base of the l. | wyldfire wrote: | Battery life. Many of us using memory are using it on portable | devices. And even if we're using servers, the power consumed | there matters too. | | Refreshing that RAM costs power and more RAM means more energy -- | even if the memory is unused. | andyjohnson0 wrote: | _" Case took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a | Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung | up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi | wasn't taking calls."_ | | - Neuromancer, by William Gibson, 1984 | [deleted] | zmachinaz wrote: | Problem is, there is a big divide in user base: For a normal | user, 8 GB is mostly sufficient. If you have a lot of chrome tabs | open, 16 GB makes your day. But, if you are any sort of a | creator, you can not have enough ... my 256GB is barely enough. | macrolime wrote: | 8 gigabytes is not enough to run Windows. It ok for an iPad, | but any Windows computer with 8GB ram essentially unusable and | will crawl to a halt the second you open a web browser. | | What normal users don't use browsers? | icedchai wrote: | I'm on 8 gig Windows laptop running Firefox right now. | There's over 3 gigs RAM free. It's bad, but not that bad. | anthk wrote: | We use Ublock Origin and try to compress the RAM as a virtual | swap everywhere. Chrom* based browsers have optimized | switches for low end machines, starting with --light, that's | it, append that parameter to your desktop shortcut and things | will speed up a bit. Using the web today without UBo today | it's suicidal. | mnd999 wrote: | I actually do have 100gb of ram in my desktop, mainly because I | got a bit carried away on eBay and bought an epyc, and you kinda | have to fill all the slots to get the performance. | sturob wrote: | It could be interpreted as him owning 100 gigs of RAM across all | his devices. | | I'd estimate I'm around 50-60, so I'm sure plenty of HNers are | over 100 total? | kelnos wrote: | If most people here use laptops (which is my -- perhaps flawed | -- perception), then maybe not. | | 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! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-06 23:00 UTC)