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12GB seems an odd number, when it's usually multiples of 8. Anyone else think that? I wonder if it's because of size constraints?
by akulbe 8y ago
12GB seems an odd number, when it's usually multiples of 8. Anyone else think that? I wonder if it's because of size constraints?
- zitterbewegung 8y agoIt’s not 12 GB it’s 12 Gb (1.5GB) although it is still an odd size. I would imagine the odd size could be due to yields of the new memory. EDIT: thanks Child post for correcting my typo.
- mciancia 8y agoWell, since you started, it's not 1.5Gb, but 1.5GB :)
- garaetjjte 8y agoOr more accurately 1.5GiB ;)
- simlevesque 8y agoI always thought that 8 gb is not enough but 16g is too much for me. 12Gb sounds nice.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- BeefySwain 8y agoWhile 12 is not a power of two, it is the sum of two powers of two (4 and 8). A number of workstations that I have designed has used 2 sticks of 4GB RAM, and 2 sticks of 2GB RAM. This has saved money at little to no cost to performance. Perhaps Micron is doing something similar here?
- hinkley 8y agoAlso, and speaking as a jaded developer, it’s strategically a bad idea to give your team a 2x bump in available memory especially if it’s maxing out the memory on your servers. If that’s 16GB per slot then 12GB DRAM sticks let you slowly increase memory a bit longer. Once you hit the ceiling a whole bunch of disciplines have to change overnight. Better to give them a 25-50% bump and start the story about horizontal scalability before you’re entirely out of other options.
- tracker1 8y agoRealistically that extra 25% is already taken up by the OS, GUI and other resources (AV, IDE, Electron apps, etc). You're already at a disadvantage to most server platforms. I've been running 16-32GB for a very long time now. Servers can go into the multiple TB ranges.
- userbinator 8y agoA datasheet for a related non-power-of-2-sized product from Micron gives a hint as to what they're doing: https://prod.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/data-sheet/dram/mobile-dram/low-power-dram/lpddr4/272b_z9am_qdp_mobile_lpddr4.pdf https://prod.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/data-shee... Page 28: "For non-binary memory densities, only a half of the row address space is valid. When the MSB address bit is HIGH, then the MSB-1 address bit must be LOW." They basically cut off the upper 1/4 of the address decoder.
- wmf 8y agoPhones want 6 GB so they're making 1.5 GB chips. Apparently 4x 1.5 GB is cheaper than 3x 2 GB, probably because of yield. I imagine it complicates the address decode slightly but that's it. This reminds me of triple-core processors that were "inconceivable" right until they shipped.
- dsr_ 8y agoWere there any 3-core processors which were not de-rated 4-core processors?
- wmf 8y agoThe Xbox 360 comes to mind.
- gyrccc 8y agoApple's A8X is one. Here's the die shot from AnandTech/Chipworks: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/8716/A8X%20draft%20floorplan.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/8716/A8X%20draft%20floorpl...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- equalunique 8y agoPS3 had a 9-core (3*3).
- retromario 8y agoThe PS3 had a PowerPC main core cpu and a 8 core cell chip. Of the 8 SPU cores, only 6 were available to developers as one was reserved for OS functions and the other, ironically enough, was held back for yield purposes.
- qwerty456127 8y ago> Phones want 6 GB Why? Why not 8? Whatever, I doubt I've ever seen a phone with more than 2 GB RAM. I wish my phone was as powerful as my PC (which is very old, has 4 GB RAM and can't handle more because of the chipset limitations) so I could just attach peripherals I want, boot a desktop Linux (directly or in a VM) and use it instead of the PC.