Ask HN: What would you do with a 1 TB of RAM workstation?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225528

by partycoder • 8 years ago

3 4 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was looking at Intel Optane announcements, and was overly impressed by the fact that there would be individual memory modules of up to 512 GB of RAM available as early as next year.

What would you exactly do with 1 TB of RAM in your workstation?

CyberFonic• 8 years ago

Transcode lotsa cat videos in parallel !

But seriously, my reading of Intel's announcement is that Optane modules are a form of SSD and not dynamic RAM. Thus the access times are orders of magnitude longer than for "real" DRAM based DDR4 SIMMS.

bradknowles• 8 years ago

Optane is faster than SSD, but not as fast as RAM.

But it is permanent storage, not ephemeral, like RAM.

So, either it takes the place of SSD and maybe we have new algorithms for accessing that permanent storage, or it sits as an additional layer between RAM and SSD.

Maybe what we call RAM today becomes a L4 cache into the much larger storage of Optane.

Dunno, but Optane is not nearly as fast as RAM, so you’re not really going to be able to effectively use it like you would have with RAM.

bighard• 8 years ago

run two chrome instances at once!

kirankn• 8 years ago

haha.. so would I :-)

Ask HN: What would you do with a 1 TB of RAM workstation?

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