Which seems to be the sister site of Register; https://www.blocksandfiles.com/architecture/2026/06/26/panmn...

Single channel RAM surely beats any disk-based swap.

Also you calculate in the machine cost and R&D.

RAM hiked because the demand spiked and these companies are now in power. Before apple and other companies told them the prices and had hardly any money for investment.

From a quick skim, you could think of this as roughly equivalent to shoving a large amount of DDR4 on a PCIe card and using it as a swap space. It's more sophisticated (see CXL protocol), but that gives you an idea of the tradeoffs. It seems there is some OS-level support for moving hot/cold pages between the main fast DRAM and the expansion higher latency DRAM.

It's a very valid point that DRAM has a fairly long lifetime and contains significant embedded carbon emissions, as well as the current availability crisis of new DRAM.

I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).

The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.

Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.

Weights need to be loaded into the accelerator's processor fast, which means they need to be physically adjacent to it, but there is limited physical space for that - not enough to fit the all the weights of a 1T+ param model, so weights get loaded into VRAM dynamically according to what part of the model is being run.

ROM (I guess we're talking Flash memory) can be dense, since it is built vertically - many hundreds of layers, but this comes at the cost of poor performance, so even if you could fit enough ROM next to the processor it would not be fast enough.

Without cache coherency, you have to be more careful about how you use the memory and the performance story is complex. Ram over CXL is going to have worse perf than ram on the cpu memory controller, but there shouldn't be any big gotchas.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383521792853

And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to.

At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s.

And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984.

I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much.

And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right.

I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still.

[0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.

What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.

Reminds me of the days of JBOD arrays. Mac OS X had built-in support for it.

JBOR?

China is desperate to sell anything to... everyone. If there's a market, they'll eventually be there to fill it.

It took them decades for cars, but now they did it.

For RAM, CXMT went from 20 000 wafers per month to... 240 000 wafers per month in something like two years. And they're extending capacity massively now. It's a company only 10 years old.

The market is there and China shall flood it: that's how they operate with everything.

At some point they'll probably even come with GPUs that shall do 80% of the job for 20% of the price.

Just like you can buy chinese server motherboards at 1/5th the price of a SuperMicro one today.

So I'm not sure hardware is going to be only for big companies: China is going to put pressure on the OpenAI and Anthropic of this world locking all the RAM / SSDs / chips of this world.

I have 32GB of DDR3 that would be great for scratch space or cache of i could throw it on a card.

The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.

This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.

For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.

Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above?

Genuinely curious :)

This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.

Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.

it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types.

it’s all uninformed fear mongering

akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.

Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706

[1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.

I've recently gotten into fountain pens. Sure, a $7 Jinhao or $15 Hongdian pen isn't going to write quite as nice as a $200+ pen, but they're about 80% of the way there, and you can buy tons of them for the cost of a single more expensive pen. Plus, some models will accept Western nibs just fine which means you're buying a cheap barrel and assembling a much higher quality product for almost pennies on the dollar.

One would do well not to underestimate their ability to fill markets. It may take years, but it will happen.

We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).

Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.

I would counter tho that 1) this isn't the first time there's been a memory price/supply crunch, and "I've got a drawer full of last gen memory I can't use" is kinduva IT cliche, and 2) 'more memory' has always been a pain point, especially with industry practices like chipsets only supporting relatively small physical memory relative to address space (e.g. all those Intel LGA775 chipsets that capped at 4 or 8GB). Oh, and 2a) 'faster disk' has always been a pain point...

But, yeah...obviously my impression of things doesn't match market reality.

Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?

> And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic.

He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.

This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh. I don't want to assumr you're an LLM, perhaps we can blame morning grogginess.

"Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memory is one of the largest single embodied-emissions contributors"

[8] U. Gupta, M. Elgamal, G. Hills, G.-Y. Wei, H.-H. S. Lee, D. Brooks, and C.-J. Wu, “ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems with an Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’22), 2022.

[4] D. Azevedo, M. Patterson, J. Pouchet, and R. Tipley, “Carbon usage effectiveness (cue): A green grid data center sustainability metric,” White paper, vol. 32, 2010.

[33] J. Wang, D. S. Berger, F. Kazhamiaka, C. Irvene, C. Zhang, E. Choukse, K. Frost, R. Fonseca, B. Warrier, C. Bansal, J. Stern, R. Bianchini, and A. Sriraman, “Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon,” in Proceedings of the 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ser. ISCA ’24, 2025, p. 452–470.

Not a reference, but I found https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emis... which goes into great detail on the subject. I hadn't realized there were significant emissions of fluorinated gases directly from the fabs, which is mildly alarming. Although it looks like there has been a crackdown on this either politically or through ESG policies.

They seemed to stop making them altogether around when SSDs came out which probably shrunk the market niche right out of viability.

Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.

Yeah, I think this is it. The humans were the point, not the minutiae of the tech.

(Btw, I hadn't noticed you'd responded whilst I was editing my comment to express myself a bit more clearly - I hope anyway - so the quotes don't quite match but I don't think it matters, because the sentiment is hopefully clear enough both ways!)

To say "anticlanker" sounds like you hate LLMs, or do you approve of them and you use that term disparagingly? I am not "anticlanker" I'm just a person who is aware that unscrupulous people very very frequently have LLMs generate comments and posts for them

Anyway, the point is that in the future you cannot own things. Whether that is because of the small market or because of other reasons, that does not matter.

I'm sure a chinese EV group could key in on the same pure-value market if there isn't a group already doing that. 'Golf carts for the street.'

"This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh." <-- the casual bigotry;

"I don't want to assumr you're an LLM" <-- yes you do, dont be a dunce. this is the anticlanker sentiment.

"perhaps we can blame morning grogginess." <-- or it's an honestly held opinion expressed earnestly, and you did nothing to explain why you disagree, hence me calling your post casual bigotry