[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!
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