5 ms·
While 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
by BeefySwain 8y ago
While 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.