Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

https://rubenerd.com/weird-al-had-100-gb-of-ram/

by Tomte • 4 years ago

301 400 4 years ago

ollien• 4 years ago

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...

RajT88• 4 years ago

32gb is totally worthwhile. I don't know if I need 32gb exactly, but I desperately needed more than 16gb.

waynesonfire• 4 years ago

at least on linux, any unused ram is going to be used for your buffer cache. get as much memory as you can afford.

erulabs• 4 years ago

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.

inciampati2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I work in video games development and all our workstations have 128GB of ram - I consider that the bare minimum nowadays.

TillE• 4 years ago

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.

malfist• 4 years ago

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.

NovaVeles3• 4 years ago

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?

Sohcahtoa823• 4 years ago

Today, windows 11 requires 4GB or ram

That's gotta be painful, though, unless you only ever use a single browser tab.

hnuser123456• 4 years ago

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.

einr• 4 years ago

Most of this is not historically accurate.

Vista required 512 MB. In practice, that probably sucked, but those were the paper specs.

XP might have required 64 MB on paper but it crawled and was practically useless on that spec (like Windows 95 was on 4 MB). Never saw anyone do it. A common spec in 2001 would be 256 MB or at an absolute minimum, 128.

Vista came out in 2007 and absolutely no one was selling 64 MB desktop computers at that point. 64 MB is 1997-1998 spec -- in 2007 it would commonly be 512 MB or 1 GB.

It is true, however, that Vista had astronomically high minimum specs for the time -- some machines sold at the time could just barely run it -- and that it probably drove a lot of upgrades.

itronitron2• 4 years ago

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.

BoorishBears6• 4 years ago

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

obblekk• 4 years ago

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?

dale_glass• 4 years ago

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).

seiferteric• 4 years ago

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.

inciampati2• 4 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa823• 4 years ago

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.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

I think it's really quite the opposite.

Compute resource consumption is like a gas, it expands to fill whatever container you give it.

Things didn't reach a comfortable level, Moore's Law just slowed down a lot so bloat slowed at pace. When developers can get a machine with twice as much resources every year and a half, things feel uncomfortable real quick for everybody else. When developer's can't ... things stop being so uncomfortable for everyone.

However, there is a certain amount of physical reality that has capped needs. Audio and video have limits to perceptual differences; with a given codec (which are getting better as well) there is a maximum bitrate where a human will be able to experience an improvement. Lots of arguing about where exactly, but the limit exists and so the need for storage/compute/memory to handle media has a max and we've hit that.

Syonyk• 4 years ago

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...

bombcar14• 4 years ago

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.

paulmd2• 4 years ago

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.

sdenton4• 4 years ago

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.

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

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.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

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.

_carbyau_3• 4 years ago

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.

It isn't often you really want it, but it is nice to have when you do. I am still bitter at Intel for mainstream 4-core'ing it for years...

yetanotherloser• 4 years ago

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)

icedchai4• 4 years ago

In 1995, I remember buying a Pentium PC with 32 megs of RAM. Gigabytes of RAM wasn't common until the early 2000's!

scarface74• 4 years ago

In 1992, I had an LCII with 10 MB RAM and that was considered extravagant. 24MB in 1994 was considered high end.

I bought a 32MB SIMM to attach to my DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my PowerMac 6100/60 for $300 in 1996.

Even as late as 2008, having 4GB RAM was not common.

anthk11• 4 years ago

Pretty sure 4 gig RAM was common consumer level then

I wish. Y2k3, AMD Athlon, 256MB of RAM. That could run the whole KDE, Kopete, Konqueror and Amarok DE combo in a breeze.

ajsnigrutin• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

kilroy123• 4 years ago

Can confirm my Mac has 64.

NovaVeles3• 4 years ago

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.

zamadatix2• 4 years ago

Put Windows/MacOS on it and you'll use 3 GB just booting up :p.

acchow• 4 years ago

Interesting point that RAM has basically not moved up in consumer computers in 10+ years... wonder why.

Smartphones gradually became the limiting factor

lostgame3• 4 years ago

Worse, it's now all soldered in, so we can't even upgrade it.

Like - fuck. this. shit.

I will take - in a heartbeat - (we'd all better!) whatever slight decrease in performance and slightly larger design that comes from not being soldered in half a microsecond if it means I can actually upgrade the RAM later on after my purchase.

Not just because I want continued value out of my purchase - because honestly, that's not even getting started on the amount of eWaste that must be created from this selfish, harmful; wasteful pattern.

Think about all the MacBook Airs out there stuck with 4GB of RAM and practically useless 128GB SSD's that could be useful if Apple didn't intentionally make them useless.

We've certainly gone very far backward in terms of any computer hardware worth purchasing in the last ten years.

I really don't get the point, beyond greed - of this whole soldering garbage. No performance or size benefits can be worth not being able to continue to reap value from my investment a couple years down the road.

This not only creates seriously less waste, but also nurtures a healthy, positive attitude of valuing our hardware instead of seeing it as a throwaway, replaceable thing.

I truly hope environmental laws make it illegal at some point. The EU seems to be good with that stuff. The soldering issue accomplishes literally nothing beyond nurturing, continuing, and encouraging a selfish culture of waste that only gets worse the more and more accepted we allow it to become.

We've only got one planet. It's way - way - WAY - past time we started acting like it.

Ten years ago, the state of hardware was far more sustainable than it is now.

For. Fucking. Shame.

javajosh• 4 years ago

I have 64G of RAM in my framework laptop with room for 64G more. It's not all bad. (The state of mobile phone storage (not to mention removable batteries) has gotten significantly worse over time. Heck, they even dropped the 3.5mm headphone jack which is honestly fucking insane.)

bombcar14• 4 years ago

I remember the old setup - buy or build a PC, and a year or two later max the RAM (for significantly less now) and get another year or two out of it.

Then for awhile you could use SSDs to do the same thing.

But now it’s all laptops as far as the eye can see, with soldered RAM.

thenthenthen• 4 years ago

Im still daily driving my 2013 macbook air with 128gb ssd and well 8gb ram. 100’s of browser tabs, photoshop, kicad and illustrator often at the same time. Never reboot, always sleep. Runs Catalina. Best machine ever. [edit] while going through many eeepcs, several thinkpads and two desktop pcs in that period [edit2: these were prolly older than 10 years tho ;)]

faeriechangling3• 4 years ago

I’ve used those MacBook airs before and those weak dual core CPUs really don’t have much beef to them, and the screens are these 1440x900 TN panels (not sure about the vertical resolution) which was low spec even for the time.

I don’t see upgradability being essential to longevity. I think you can just buy everything you need for the next decade on day one.

The soldering uses significantly less power.

AussieWog932• 4 years ago

To be fair, CPUs haven't improved a ridiculous amount either.

10 years ago, mainstream computers were being built with i5-2500ks in them. Now, for a similar price point you might be looking at a Ryzen 5 5600x. User Benchmark puts this at a 50-60% increase in effective 1/2/4 core workloads, and a 150-160% increase in 8 core workloads.

Compared to the changes in SSDs (64GB/128GB SATA3 being mainstream then, compared to 1TB NVMe now) or GPUs (Can an HD6850 and RTX 3060 even be compared!?), it's pretty meagre!

chrismorgan• 4 years ago

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs... is the comparison you’re referring to.

I recall hearing a few years back that User Benchmark was wildly unreliable where AMD was involved, presenting figures that made them look much worse than they actually were. No idea of the present situation. I also vaguely recall the “effective speed” rating being ridiculed (unsure if this is connected with the AMD stuff or not), and +25% does seem rather ridiculous given that its average scores are all over +50%, quite apart from things like the memory speed (the i5-2500K supported DDR3 at up to 1333MHz, the 5600X DDR4 at up to 3200MHz).

An alternative comparison comes from PassMark, who I think are generally regarded as more reliable. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-R... presents a much more favourable view of the 5600X: twice as fast single-threaded, and over 5.3× as fast for the multi-threaded CPU Mark.

throwawaylinux2• 4 years ago

DRAM hit a scaling wall about a decade ago. Capacity per dollar has not been improving significantly, certainly not at the exponential rate it had been for the prior 50 years or so.

https://thememoryguy.com/dram-prices-hit-historic-low/

As to why, search for words like "dram scaling challenge". I'm no expert but I believe capacitor (lack of) scaling is the biggest problem. While transistors and interconnections continued shrinking, capacitors suitable for use in DRAM circuits ran out of steam around 2xnm.

pmorici• 4 years ago

I would guess it’s because the average user just doesn’t use enough ram for it to matter. My current desktop built in 2014 has 64GB and it seems like I never come close to using it all even running multiple virtual machines and things like that.

joveian• 4 years ago

I think RAM has been increasing but for the GPU rather than CPU. Also, I think Microsoft isn't quite as bad as Apple at memory usage so it still isn't that easy for a large number of people to really need more than 8GB and for anyone who plays games it is better to have extra memory in the GPU. I don't think there is all that much swapping needed with 8GB but most CPU memory tends to be used as disk cache so it still helps to have faster disks. I think of computers that started to have 8GB RAM over a decade ago as the "modern era of computing" and those systems are still fine now (at least with SSD) for a wide range of casual use, other than software that explicitly requires newer stuff (mostly GPU, sometimes virtualization or vector stuff). My sense is most hardware changes since have been in the GPU and SSDs.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Overall RAM in your systems HAS been steadily increasing, it's just targeted at the use cases where that matters, so it's primarily been in things like the GPU rather than system memory. In the past ten years GPUs have gone from ~3GB[1] to now 24GB[2] in high-end consumer cards.

Another factor is in speed; In that ten year span we went from DDR3 to DDR5, moving from 17000 to 57600 transfers per second over that time frame. SSDs are much more common meaning it's easier to keep RAM full of only the things you need at the moment and drop what you don't out.

In terms of RAM density increasing, I think it's been more driven by demand than anything and there simply isn't a serious demand out there except in the very high end server space. Even compute is more driven by GPU than system memory, so you're mostly talking about companies that want to run huge in-memory databases, versus in the past when the entire industry has been starving for more memory density. The story has been speed matters more.

I'd also suggest that improvements in compression and hardware-assisted decompression for video streams have made a difference, as whatever is in memory on your average consumer device is smaller.

Coupling this with efficiency improvements of things like DirectStorage where the data fed into the GPU doesn't even need to touch RAM, the requirement to have high system memory available will be further lessened for gaming or compute workloads going forward.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372

[2] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...

magicalhippo2• 4 years ago

I'd guess the problem is in scaling RAM density itself

Yea, seems[1] that's the issue. I wrote some more about it in my other[2].

[1] https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758022

thanatos5192• 4 years ago

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.

timbit42• 4 years ago

40 inches wide

What would that be diagonally?

ISL• 4 years ago

Somewhere between 56.5" and 40".

mayoff• 4 years ago

46 inches at at 16:9 aspect ratio.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

I have a 40" monitor

jbellis• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

And "Slackers" would have a whole new meaning these days.

madmoose• 4 years ago

Wait till you see Frank's 2000" TV!

JohnFen• 4 years ago

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.

dotdi2• 4 years ago

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.

vonseel• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Image or video editing?

Miraste4• 4 years ago

The M1 is absurdly better than Intel Macs about swapping, I think because of the giant caches. I never have memory issues on my 8gb M1 Mac Mini, but my work 16gb Intel Macbook runs into memory slowdowns as soon as it launches Slack, a browser, and an IDE at the same time.

Sakos• 4 years ago

I have a 16GB M1 MBP. I can easily get it to slow to a crawl if I'm not careful. This is with Intellij Idea and other tools I use regularly. It's the worst thing about Macbooks, limited RAM.

faeriechangling3• 4 years ago

I’ve managed to soft lock 16gb machines with inefficient libraries I needed to use to pull data, whereas a 32gb machine would have just barely survived.

I feel the real use of high amounts of memory is to run bad software.

wincy• 4 years ago

Hahah I'm glad I got the 16GB M1 Macbook Air because I can run Stable Diffusion on it! I'm having so much fun generating images for free to my hearts content.

flutas• 4 years ago

To me it sounds like GP was implying someone not on his team was trying to purchase the under-specced laptops for his team.

macrolime2• 4 years ago

8GB ram is not enough to run any kind of modern web browser

anthk11• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

That's demonstrably false - I can run Safari or Chrome on my 8Gb M1 macbook air 24/7 without any issues.

lalaithion• 4 years ago

Currently running Spotify + VSCode + Chrome + Slack on 8GB. That's 4 browsers, and it's totally fine.

Veedrac• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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...

fudged71• 4 years ago

Anyone else get stuck parsing the title whether it's Weird AI or Weird Al?

DOsinga• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

My font (Firefox) was actually very helpful for this. A tiny serif at the base of the l.

sien• 4 years ago

Weird AI would be a great name for an ML system that made up lyrics for popular songs.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-ai-yancovic-algorithm-...

Searching Google for “weird ai” just returns “weird Al” results heh

mnd999• 4 years ago

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.

thegagne• 4 years ago

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.

z0r4• 4 years ago

I need >16GB of RAM to reasonably run Chrome on a personal computer.

BoorishBears6• 4 years ago

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.

brundolf3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Unless you have some extreme circumstances, like a plugin that's leaking memory or 100s of tabs, I really really doubt that.

digitallyfree• 4 years ago

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.

anigbrowl5• 4 years ago

As someone prone to having 3-400 tabs open at once for months on end, no you don't.

I'm at the point of wanting 32-64gb of memory these days, but only because I like messing with huge datasets.

coldtea• 4 years ago

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__• 4 years ago

Yes but what Slack does and ICQ didn't is justify a monthly subscription, so it's an improvement you see.

thriftwy• 4 years ago

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.

FreeFull• 4 years ago

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.

robocat• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

Sohcahtoa823• 4 years ago

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.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

I’ve been pleased with Skylines even heavily modded in 16 GB, but that’s with all the “save memory” mods running.

smiley1437• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

I’d pay for a local program that would fully text index every page I visit forever so I can search for them again quickly.

lanstin• 4 years ago

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.

stereolambda• 4 years ago

So basically bookmarks and history devolved into tabs for people? I do notice the difference between my Firefox installation (with 'live downloaded' search suggestions disabled), where I mostly can pull anything I want from the past, and the times when I have to use Chrome, which at least by default makes it difficult to recall a page visited even a moment ago. (Yes, technically you have history hidden in menus.) I would dread living that in normal browsing.

mwcampbell4• 4 years ago

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.

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

What better options than electron can we hope for?

Writing UIs in TypeScript with React is amazingly productive. A huge amount of effort has been invested into making that entire stack fast and it’s still a lot slower than I‘d want it to be. I’ve written some websites in Yew (react-like rust library), but either Rust or Yew seems to really suck for UI stuff. I feel like we’re missing some kind of nice middle-of-the-road language that’s both reasonably productive and results in reasonably performant apps. OCaml is the only language I know of that’s in that sweet spot, but there’s no UI libraries for it unless you go the ReasonML/react route, but then you’re just compiling to JS again.

anthk11• 4 years ago

Qt5/6.

staticassertion2• 4 years ago

If that pressure doesn't exist than why does it have to come from somewhere? I also run exactly 0 electron apps but definitely would like to have more ram - 64GB would give me some breathing room, 128GB would probably be optimal.

mwcampbell4• 4 years ago

You're right, real pressure to keep software bloat under control mostly doesn't exist, but it should, for the sake of our users.

MBCook2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

MBCook2• 4 years ago

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.

jimt1234• 4 years ago

I wonder if Bill Gates still does Weird Al's tech support.

dimensionc132• 4 years ago

Weird" Al Yankovic - Amish Paradise is a better song about technology

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

w-m• 4 years ago

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.

nocman9• 4 years ago

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

function_seven• 4 years ago

See also "Wi-Fi" meaning any Internet access now. Or "screen saver" meaning the desktop wallpaper.

hosteur• 4 years ago

Huh? I have never encountered those.

treeman79• 4 years ago

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.

HankB99• 4 years ago

The CPU is that box that the monitor and keyboard connect to. :-/

YurgenJurgensen3• 4 years ago

Just three days ago, professional streamer Hakos Baelz made this exact mistake.

...and then had to be told that the cable you plug into the back of a landline telephone isn't just a power connector. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever know how she thought telephones actually worked.

dreamcompiler2• 4 years ago

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.

mwcampbell4• 4 years ago

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.

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

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.

anigbrowl5• 4 years ago

I used to explain it to clients as the difference between having your files nicely organized in cabinets or on shelves, and having the contents of several different files strewn over the desk. For people who like to keep a tidy desk this metaphor made immediate sense.

thaumasiotes6• 4 years ago

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.

nocman9• 4 years ago

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).

rcxdude• 4 years ago

I think the main point is all the other (technical) brags are quite quaintly outdated (T1 lines are glacial by todays standard, while interestingly the lines about how quickly hardware becomes obsolete have become less accurate over time), on the other hand 100GB of RAM is still quite extreme.

bdowling2• 4 years ago

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...

sterlind• 4 years ago

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?

nocman9• 4 years ago

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.

fortran77• 4 years ago

Weird Al has an engineering degree from Cal Poly

heresie-dabord• 4 years ago

In this particular song, His Weirdness offers a few timeless observations:

Upgrade my system at least twice a day
What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?
You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

bena2• 4 years ago

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.

nocman9• 4 years ago

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.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 4 years ago

I still tell people that I'm double clickin' on my mizouse.

qzw• 4 years ago

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.

nocman9• 4 years ago

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.

sxv• 4 years ago

| basically 0% chance

lost credibility here

thanatos5192• 4 years ago

He even mentions hard drive space separately, as something comparable to removable storage:

You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette

You're the biggest joke on the Internet

I can only conclude that he did understand the distinction between RAM and hard drive space. The song is full of jokes that show a deep understanding of the topic. Indeed I don't find any nits to pick.

faluzure• 4 years ago

Another plausible explanation is that `100 Gigabytes of RAM` is more catchy than `100 Megabytes of RAM`

krallja3• 4 years ago

"A thousand megabytes of RAM" has the same meter, and sounds more like an absurd brag than "A hundred gigabytes" even though it's smaller

Brian_K_White• 4 years ago

I don't think I've ever heard anyone confuse ram and mass storage by saying "ram".

All I think I've ever seen is anyone who says "ram" knows what ram is, and people who are fuzzy on it call it all "memory".

nocman9• 4 years ago

Yeah, I think that's mostly true.

However, I'm sure I have heard a few people use RAM when they meant hard drive space. Though, in fairness, those were probably friends/relatives who used computers but didn't know a lot about how they actually work.

TakeBlaster16• 4 years ago

I'm 100% sure he knew what he was talking about. That line wouldn't have fit the song if he threw out a reasonable-sounding number for the 90s.

Defragging my hard drive occasionally, when I start to notice drops in i/o performance
I got me 32 megabytes of RAM

No thank you.

int_19h4• 4 years ago

Conversely, when it comes to mobile devices, RAM is still used in its original meaning, but somehow internal Flash storage became "ROM".

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

That one is logical, kinda, flash memory is [EEP]ROM.

RunawayGalaxy• 4 years ago

especially likely, because he's talking about *defragging a hard drive*

Can someone explain why this is incorrect? I thought a hard drive is typically what one would defrag

vlovich1232• 4 years ago

The thing people are discussing is the 100GiB of RAM line. You wouldn’t typically defrag RAM (although that was a thing back then) and 100GiB is more indicative of HD space and not RAM. So the question is whether the two lines are related and did Weird Al say that defragging his disk freed up 100GiB of RAM (an impossible amount at the time) or 100 GiB of storage and got RAM and disk confused.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

What should he have had been talking about defragging?

I don’t remember ever defragging anything but my hard drive.

vanderZwan• 4 years ago

Or the fact that he's "doing it for thrills" implies he doesn't need to because he has mounted his entire file system as a RAM disk.

ChrisRR• 4 years ago

I think the poster is overthinking it.

It was probably just that a gigabyte sounds big, 100 sounds big. Therefore, 100 gigs

seba_dos12• 4 years ago

the other plausible explanation

It's not really plausible in the context of those lyrics.

goatcode2• 4 years ago

MiB

That 'i' is silly. As is the one in "GiB."

m2fkxy• 4 years ago

why? how else do you designate binary prefixes?

icedchai4• 4 years ago

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!)

Kwpolska• 4 years ago

Windows (and most of the world) doesn’t bother, 1 KB = 1024 B. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17...

kelnos2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

goatcode2• 4 years ago

Alright, I'm on board. Thank you for the information & references.

jabbany2• 4 years ago

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_thibedeau2• 4 years ago

Without ECC you've exploded your vulnerability to bit flips.

jabbany2• 4 years ago

Not a hardware person but it seems it wouldn't be that much of a difference?

Assuming bit flips happen at a fixed rate (cosmic rays whatnot), then wouldn't the likelihood only depend on the actual amount of memory used rather than the total capacity? Like, if a bit flips in unused RAM does it really matter... And used memory is used one way or the other so the flip would have happened anyways.

I think the bigger issue is outright RAM failures/errors are harder to diagnose. Like if I had a bad chip on one of the sticks, it would be harder to notice since the chance of hitting that error and crashing is much lower, so the system would seem to run fine most of the time. Doing memtest is rather annoyingly slow so I've only done it once after building the system to make sure none of the sticks were DOA.

On another note, for my NAS I do run ECC (4 x 8G DDR3) on a server board and over the course of about 7 years, I've had 1 stick fail in the form of consistently getting stuck bits (which are then corrected and reported) and have had about 3 or 4 spurious flips in total on the other sticks.

antidaily• 4 years ago

Lost my virginity to that song.

slg• 4 years ago

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.

zmachinaz• 4 years ago

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.

macrolime2• 4 years ago

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?

icedchai4• 4 years ago

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.

anthk11• 4 years ago

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.

dagw• 4 years ago

I have 8 GB on my old Surface Pro running Windows 10, and it works perfectly fine for browsing, office work and most lighter programming tasks.

sturob• 4 years ago

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?

kelnos2• 4 years ago

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!

bombcar14• 4 years ago

One stupid old VM server from eBay throws me past the mark, and that doesn’t even count the other space heater that’s just off.

LeoPanthera2• 4 years ago

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.

Kerrick• 4 years ago

Going from 2016 to today (2022) is three more doublings, which would be 64GB of RAM -- and that is an available configuration in laptops such as the XPS 17 or the MacBook Pro. That's not even considering desktops (which can handle 128GB) or workstations (which can reach terabytes).

bombcar14• 4 years ago

8GB in ‘16 would be a nice amount - 64GB seems a bit high for me today. And 8GB in 16 was common but I feel 64GB today is relatively rare.

tanjtanjtanj• 4 years ago

I purchased a 32GB kit of fast-for-the-time RAM for around $150 in 2016. There was a 64GB kit available for a little more than I wanted to pay as well. In years after that the price of RAM went WAY up due to a mixture of natural disasters, RAM cartels, and a change of priorities for manufacturers. In 2019 I was offered $320 for those same sticks of used RAM. Looking at current motherboards of the same type, they also top out at 64GB (I know there are higher limits but I'm in the Mini-ITX ecosystem). So I agree with your point just disagree a bit on the 8GB number as I had a fairly middle of the road laptop in 2012 with 16GB of RAM as well.

SECProto2• 4 years ago

Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

And he needed it because of his 2000" TV!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDostWXpcU

fsagx• 4 years ago

No. It’s all about the pentiums:

https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos

SECProto2• 4 years ago

Yes, the article is about that song. I was trying to make a humourous connection to another Weird Al song.

ehayes• 4 years ago

Old enough to remember upgrading the RAM in our home PC so we could play Doom —quadrupled it to 4 megabytes.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

So many upgrades to meet “minimum” specs back then - I recall scrounging around to find a video card with just enough RAM to run SimCity 2000.

Now almost all upgrades are to make it better, not make it work at all.

JuanPosadas• 4 years ago

I remember a friend having a 64MB computer and struggling to play Diablo II. It would always lag. I upgraded him to 512MB using some old RAM sticks. The game never lagged again.

alfiedotwtf• 4 years ago

"What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?"

wyldfire• 4 years ago

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.

wheybags• 4 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible / worth it to have the os prioritise one stick and power down the others until reaching some utilisation threshold.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

This is basically equivalent to having swap on an SSD. So it’s cheaper to just have a larger/faster SSD.

monksy• 4 years ago

Defragmentation isn't as big of an issue on SSDs, but trimming is an issue.

throwaway0asd• 4 years ago

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.

naniwaduni2• 4 years ago

So are we expecting UltraRAM to become commercially viable before or after the Mill architecture?

zamadatix2• 4 years ago

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 32 into an AMD server and beat whatever the RAM bandwidth and cost/GB will be it's just not very useful to do so so nobody really does it as a RAM replacement.

Dwedit• 4 years ago

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.

jl6• 4 years ago

It took Weird Al a further 7 years to perfect the tech diss track:

https://genius.com/Weird-al-yankovic-white-and-nerdy-lyrics

mgaunard7• 4 years ago

I don't understand how defragmentation isn't an issue on SSDs.

It's mostly a filesystem problem, not a hardware problem.

antod3• 4 years ago

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.

mgaunard7• 4 years ago

If you read data to an arbitrary position in a file, you first need to figure out in which block(s) that data is located.

If the file is fragmented, this may require more reads than if it's contiguous and uses an extent.

Exact scheme is filesystem-specific.

paulkrush• 4 years ago

I encourage you to google this.

BizarroLand4• 4 years ago

Spinny hard drives have a master record file that tells the seek heads where all the parts of the data lie on the magnetic material.

It takes time for the read arms to move back and forth to literally read the data on the sector indicated by the master record file, and defragmenting the drive helped minimize that by moving the files around to be a linearly arranged as physically possible given the sophistication of the given system.

SSDs also have a similar master record file, indicating where all of the bits of the files are located on the flash memory in the hard drive, but since it makes at most the most atomically minute difference in seek times for the controller to read the data from those sectors (since there is no seek arm that has to physically move to the physical location nor any delay waiting for the spin of the disk to reach the correct location for the data read to begin) then file "fragmentation" has the most negligibly minuscule impact on file read speeds or drive performance, and given the dramatic increase in destructive writes that a file defragmentation would cause on an SSD, it should be avoided under any regular usage.

mgaunard7• 4 years ago

Hard drives do not have this metadata, the filesystem does.

People use the same filesystems on HDD and SSD drives.

Fragmented files still require more blocks to say where the various parts are.

bombcar14• 4 years ago

A hard drive can give you the next block almost instantly.

But a random block may take many many times that as it repositions the head and waits for the block to come spinning by.

And an SSD returns any block almost at the same speed, so defragmenting only increases the amount of wear on the drive (and it internally remaps anyway so you don’t even get what you’re after - block 5 is a logical block that may be currently mapped to 466 not next to block 6).

mgaunard7• 4 years ago

You don't just magically know what the next block is.

BasiliusCarver• 4 years ago

I’ve found it pretty handy to run a defragmentation in a guest OS before trying to shrink virtual hard drives. Not sure it affects all virtual drives but hyper-v vhdx can compact poorly if the data is quite fragmented and it’s often easier to defrag in the guest if the filesystem isn’t something you have drivers for on the host.

zitterbewegung• 4 years ago

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

andyjohnson0• 4 years ago

"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

NovaVeles3• 4 years ago

Yeah, that would do it. :D My work PC is currently using 8.4GB with outlook, Excel and note pad open!

cybrexalpha• 4 years ago

'Workstation-class' computers absolutely can have 128 GB of memory, or even more.

Even Apple does this (not just on the Mac Pro, you can configure the Mac Studio for it too). On the PC side all AMD Threadrippers can support at least that much, as can the Intel i9. These aren't server-class CPUs that require ECC memory or anything exotic like that either. Normal consumer hardware.

sleepytimetea• 4 years ago

I regularly work on servers with 768 GB of ECC RAM. These aren't very common but they do exist. I am trying to upgrade to a terabyte of ECC RAM.

On Amazon, they sell a 32x32GB package of ECC RAM for about $10k.

https://www.amazon.com/Adamanta-32x32GB-Upgrade-PC4-17000-Re...

anthk11• 4 years ago

With that amount of RAM you could bind an entire VM storage on it by using /dev/shm or some other TMPFS directory. Amazing.

buildbot• 4 years ago

It was probably possible with ultra-high end servers/mainframe like systems even in 1999: https://shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/E10000/spec....

bombcar14• 4 years ago

Yeah you had to go to Unix systems or similar because PAE x86 couldn’t get past 64GB.

sxates• 4 years ago

If anyone want's to one-up Weird Al, you can configure an Apple Mac Studio with 128GB of RAM for a mere $4800.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio/20-core-cpu-48...

userbinator2• 4 years ago

It's also worth noting that 64-bit x86 processors only appeared a few years after the song, with all 32-bit systems until then being limited to a theoretical maximum of 64GB (with PAE).

The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit.

I'm still comfortable with 4GB (and currently using ~1GB of it), because I stay away from the bloated web stuff. Outside of certain applications, I think there really isn't a need for huge amounts of RAM; unlike e.g. storage, which even I have several TBs of, simply because of accumulating media.

VerminOctopus1• 4 years ago

I can’t imagine how esoteric your setup must be to be fine with 4GB. Modern software eats that up with no problem.

mod• 4 years ago

Not GP, but about 75% of the time, I'm not using any GUI software besides browser & terminal.

In the terminal I'm running a tmux/vim based development environment.

Of the half dozen non-technical users whose habits I know, I think all of them use their PC exclusively for a browser. They could sub in a chromebook, I guess.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

I mainly do native (Win32) development. Like I said, staying far away from anything "modern web" related seems to make the biggest difference.

ozaark• 4 years ago

I have a 2008 Mac Pro with 64GB ram installed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

whoisterencelee• 4 years ago

It's about deminishing returns, the more ram you have the more likely you need to move bytes around.

For applications that are moving more bytes from drives to memory, this means we need to wait for the transfer and we end up preferring to delegate these applications to the cloud instead of running on our own machine, because servers are where the ram is increasing and abundant.

So basically we are doing a lot more big ram computation elsewhere and doing small ram computation on our desktop

IIAOPSW• 4 years ago

I at first read "Weird AI" rather than "Weird Al" and it took way too long to figure out my mistake.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

Okay, let's stipulate that "Weird Al" knew exactly what he was talking about, so why did he claim "100 gigabytes" which is an impossible number to achieve in one device? (Other than meter scanning) It should have been 128, yes?

vantablacksheep• 4 years ago

192G RAM (64G x 3) + 8G on the video card.

TheDong• 4 years ago

"Weird Al" was, in fact, making a song, not a rigorous piece of technical journalism.

"I got me a hundred gigabytes of ram" flows better lyrically in the song than "I got me a hundred-twenty-eight gigabytes of ram".

Whether he knew the details of typical memory module sizes or not, it's such a minor inaccuracy that the lyrical flow matters far more.

Anyway, I bet you could achieve it if you really wanted to try. Get a dell poweredge server with 24 DIMMs, install 12x8GB (96) + 4x1GB (4) for your total of 100, and with 8 DIMMs leftover.

brunorsini• 4 years ago

Getting a 64 gb 2021 MacBook Pro really changed the game for me.

The computer now works on my rhythm, not its own. No need to suspend tabs or do any other shenanigans. Sometimes it's just not productive to stop everything to clean up tabs and/or open apps. Some rabbit holes are actually quite worth digging into, and they are often RAM-hungry!

Going from 16 to 64 gb on my personal laptop meant I got to choose when to deal with my own mess... on my own terms. I much prefer to do this cleaning exercise on weekends, versus "whenever the computer starts choking up".

So yeah, highly agree with the author here. Wish Apple laptops were RAM upgradable, but I doubt that will be coming anytime soon.

dusted• 4 years ago

It's kind of terrible that people are still stuck on 16 and even 8 gib of memory, and we're suffering for it..

Firefox recently introduced the most retarded feature ever.. Unloading tabs, that breaks javascript applications and gives an unreasonably bad experience.. I disabled it, but it keeps changing back to being enabled.. I have 128 gib of memory in this machine.. I don't care if firefox uses 10 or 20 of them..

It's 2022, it's sort of ridiculous that we still even have memory tiers..

I want my on-die 16 TiB nonvolatile RAM, and I want it two years ago!

habosa• 4 years ago

Any computer targeted at business users really needs to start at 16GB minimum. I can't understand why 8GB is still the default base configuration on almost every computer.

My company made the mistake of ordering 8GB M1 MacBook Pros for everyone. After all ... they say "Pro", right? Truly the worst computer I've ever used, all because of memory management (and M1s unique memory-sharing architecture).

Even simple tasks like opening a new tab or switching windows showed serious lag. I could not run my local dev server and listen to music at the same time.

We eventually just said "screw it" and bought all new 16GB MacBook Airs. 1000x better.

5e92cb50239222b• 4 years ago

In other words, you still decided to support a manufacturer that makes it impossible to simply insert another stick of RAM (like we've been doing for decades) and requires you to throw a whole computer away. Or sell it, whatever, you've said that it's pretty much unusable already in spite of being new.

Seeing that from one of the poorer countries, you guys really do have too much money.

ehutch794• 4 years ago

the 13" pro and air are basically the same machine :-/ I'm pretty sure they're keeping that pro because it's a physical drop in replacement for previous models, just for business that want that continuity.

That 8gb though. I had to switch to one when my last macbook died. I could develop on it fine, but chrome and teams killed me. Especially teams where it's just now getting a native release. There's no reason a lot of apps are using as much memory as they do. 8gb _should_ be more than fine for any office worker.

I'm growing on the idea that developers shouldn't be getting massive amounts of memory in their machines, so they can feel any pain their users will.

HereIGoAgain• 4 years ago

OK.... This is certainly a topic.. fun to read at least. lol

zecg• 4 years ago

RAM uses power, 8GB of DDR3 was something like 3W and once you have 16GB in a personal computer, you simply don't need more for everyday use.

foobarbecue2• 4 years ago

I've often wondered this -- why isn't it normal for consumer systems to support more RAM? I built a PC with 256GB DDR4 in 2016 for working with large pointclouds, but most motherboards I looked at only supported 64GB max, and the situation doesn't seem to have changed in the last 6 years. I guess it's because the emphasis with RAM has been on improving speed rather than volume.

magicalhippo2• 4 years ago

Were you thinking about adding more RAM slots, or why the sticks aren't larger?

The reason the sticks aren't larger seems to be because they had trouble scaling down the DRAM memory cells[1] since about 2016.

DRAM works, as you might know, by letting a capacitor hold a charge (or not).

This ability is a function of the geometry of the capacitor: the area of the anode and cathode, as well as the distance between them. Leakage current discharges the capacitor, hence why DRAM needs to be periodically refreshed, the industry settled on 64ms retention time per cell[2]. Leakage current tends to go up when the features shrink, due to there being less insulation between the conductors.

As mentioned in [1] it seems things are about to change, so perhaps we'll see much larger sticks in the near future.

If you were thinking of slots, I think that's more economics and feasibility. The Threadripper motherboards had 8 slots[3], since the CPU supported it, but they were quite expensive compared to regular Ryzen motherboards. It also requires a lot more power, so forget having that in laptops. And the slots take up space, so was only for the full ATX size[4].

[1] https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram...

[2] https://www.csl.cornell.edu/~martinez/doc/isca13-mukundan.pd...

[3] https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp

[4] https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X399M%20Taichi/index.asp

donatj• 4 years ago

I bought a Mac Studio recently with 64gb of RAM. I adore it, but I am kind of missing the portability of a laptop.

I’ve been watching Facebook Marketplace recently for a cheap Mac Laptop, and I was surprised to find the place is absolutely flooded with near-new MacBook Pros with 8gb of RAM. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s the worst place to cheap out - it’s not upgradable and makes a huge performance difference.

I suspect it might be self-selecting. The reason there are so many on Facebook Marketplace is because the owners can feel they need an upgrade. Do they know the reason for it’s lackluster performance being the lack of RAM? Maybe not, they just know the machine runs poorly and are going to upgrade to a newer one with 8gb of RAM.

To contrast my 11 year old iMac I was upgrading from has 24gb of RAM and still held up fine as my daily driver. The lack of software upgrades being the thing that pushed me to upgrade.

stockerta• 4 years ago

Same, I have a 2nd generation intel i5 desktop at home. since I have upgraded to an SSD and the RAM from 8 to 24gb it gained years of new life. Perfectly capable daily driver.

FractalHQ• 4 years ago

I bought a MacBook with 64gb ram in 2019 and it’s a beast. So much so that I haven’t felt the need to upgrade to Apple silicon yet.

DanHulton• 4 years ago

Huh, that's interesting! I had a 2019 MBP with only 16gb of RAM - an amount I've been comfortable with on other computers prior to that - and it was UNUSABLE. Just MISERABLY slow. Upgraded to Apple Silicon with the same amount of RAM and it feels unstoppable, just always running at 150% of expected speed.

(I would have gotten more RAM in the 2019 laptop, but it was during that brief window where new laptop shipping times were measured in months, and I was happy to have ANY work laptop and not have to be using my old personal one, an old Air.)

cesaref• 4 years ago

Last time I worked in finance, the typical 2U machines that we ordered were configured by IT with 256Gb by default unless we said otherwise. The typical workload was data analytics, and when you've got lots of cores, you get through RAM pretty quick for those sorts of workloads (and any spare caches data which is also useful).

Home machines are typically consuming rather than producing stuff, so it seems reasonable that the RAM hasn't leapt ahead, since typical workloads aren't memory bound.

dzdt• 4 years ago

Weird Al's song released in 1999 [1]. I don't think it was possible to buy a desktop/workstation/server machine in 1999 with 100gb of addressable RAM. So the lyric is absurd (possibly intentionally so).

The first 64 bit Pentium system went to market in 2004. With 32 bit systems the maximum memory addressable per process is 4gb; this could be stretched to 64gb with PAE [2]. It might have been possible to get a 64gb RAM pentium-based server in 1999. But 100GB is simply impossible.

There were 64 bit processors from other families available in 1999. DEC, SGI, and Sun all had workstations using 64 bit processors. The earliest I can find supporting 128gb of RAM though is the SGI Origin 3800, shipping in 2001. [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_with_Scissors_(%22We... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Origin_3000_and_Onyx_300...

ACV001• 4 years ago

100G back then was more of a satire, something unimaginable. However, it is true that installed RAM hasn't increased a lot..

Actually it is not very true, in the mid 2000 4 GB was standard and now 16GB is more or less standard.

But, RAM has increased in price A LOT around 2011 when there was a RAM production crisis.

"After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, there was a severe chip shortage of NAND memory and displays."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_shortage

gmiller123456• 4 years ago

    mid 2000 4 GB was standard

I don't think so. From [1], in 2006 a Dell XPS M1710 costs $2,845 and had 1Gb of RAM. Inflation adjusted, that's $3,550, so a pretty high end system for the time. Today, you can get a 16Gb laptop for well under $1000. That's a 16x capacity increase in about as many years for 1/4th the price.

[1] https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/06/07/cost-of-a-co...

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

It is ridiculous that to get more than 16gb laptop PC it has to be a heavy gaming laptop, super expensive with high power consumption. At least here in australia. And the 16gb ones can’t be upgraded further.

iconosynclast3• 4 years ago

I'm amazed by the number of people here that think 16 or even 8 gigs are "enough" for everyday use. Sure you CAN live like that but it's noticably painful with even the most pedestrian of usage. open a browser and a handful of tabs, there goes 4 gigs, open some messengers and you got another couple gigs gone. maybe that's fine as long as browser and messengers are literally all you do but the machine becoming painfully slow to use as soon as you go from background level usage to any sort of productivity is not "good enough" by a long shot IMO

ehutch794• 4 years ago

Is the problem actually the lack of ram though? We used to browse the web just fine on megabytes of ram... Now I expect modern sites to take my resources, but 1000x more?

iconosynclast3• 4 years ago

arguably the problem is the excessive use of the resource but that's kinda just the reality of it. I'm not saying it's impossible to deal with it but it's no where near the point where I never have to think about it which is what I would consider truly "enough"

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

My primary "personal" system is an M1 MBP with 8GB of RAM. I edit 6K video on it all the time. While it could certainly use more RAM, I don't feel like I need it bad enough to justify spending the money right now.

My gaming desktop only has 16GB of RAM. It's the fastest DDR4 that my motherboard will support, granted, but all of the games I play on it are CPU or GPU bound. Additional RAM isn't going to significantly help anything.

iconosynclast3• 4 years ago

It's acceptable and can do a lot for sure but I was getting the vibe a lot of people consider more basically pointless which it IMO isn't. I think with a little bit of multitasking most users would experience a noticable improvement

gthrone• 4 years ago

This just made my day. He's randomly touring right now as well

leephillips• 4 years ago

The mere existence of this article about this particular song and this discussion about amount to a high level of (mostly) unintended meta-hilarity.

“The first, and most obvious reason, was that the song was supposed to be a bit silly!”

+5 insightful.

UniverseHacker• 4 years ago

You guys must also think 50 cent always carries guns as big as an adult human, Ice Cube has literally shot bullets into the sun, and Ludacris never drives under 100mph. Al is satirizing hyperbole in rap music. The stream of implausible claims is why the song is funny- 100gb of hard drive space wouldn't have fit with the song at all.

Also, plenty of people were actually using computers with 100gb of ram in the late 90s. ASCI Red at Sandia had 1,212gb of ram in 1997. Blue Gene/L, which they were building when this song came out had 16,000gb of ram and was designed to be upgradeable to as much as 128,000gb - even much more if the node quantity were maxed as well.

Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

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