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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

JBOR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

It’s better for server farms where engineers can customize and tune for an architecture like this.

There have been some cards that use RAM as a storage device. They were never popular because having to set it up as a disk had very limited use cases.

Single channel RAM surely beats any disk-based swap.

There is a tight resource starvation/motivation loop — the demand put on RAM and SSD and GPUs by the largest frontier models is a direct motivation to make smaller LLMs. Like an evolutionary pressure making animals smaller and more food-efficient.

These smaller models, once successful, are still likely to consume more RAM and SSD and GPUs than any other application short of high quality video processing itself (the smaller LLMs and higher end video processing seem to have about the same needs). But the resources would distribute through the market more traditionally, leading to less insane cycles.

So it seems to me that the way out of the RAM/SSD price cycle crisis that manufacturers are in — where the price fluctuates between high and low due to supply constraints and then oversupply from new production capacity - is for them to fund research into smaller LLMs. They'll still sell essentially the same amount of product. Maybe more.

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.

absolutely no idea how useful any of that would be and what kind of latency degradation going through whatever adapter would cause

and cost per transistor stopped decreasing at ~20-30nm, now small nodes are targetting energy efficiency (and thus performance, since heat is the main limiter)

Supply and demand coupled with the fact that a RAM fab can't (trivially) output compute chips, and vice versa, a compute fab can't output RAM. It's two completely different supply chains.

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.

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.