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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 SS

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?

Syonyk 4y 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...
- bombcar 4y 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.
  - rep_lodsb 4y ago
    Memory addresses were never 8 bits. Some early hobbyist machines might have had only 256 bytes of RAM present, but the address space was always larger.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      Even the Intel 4004--widely regarded as the first commercial microprocessor--had a 12-bit address space
      - compiler-guy 4y ago
        This got me thinking, and I went digging even further into historic mainframes. These rarely used eight-bit bytes, so calculating memory size on them is a little funny. But all had more than 256 bytes. Whirlwind I (1951): 2048 16-bit words, so 4k bytes. This was the first digital computer to use core memory (and the first to operate on more than one bit at a time). EDVAC (designed in 1944): 1024 44 bit-words, so about 5.6k. ENIAC (designed in 1943): No memory at all, at least not like we think of it. So there you go. All but the earliest digital computer used an address space greater than eight bits wide. I'm sure there are some micro controllers and similar that have only eight bit address spaces, but general purpose machines seem to have started at 12-bits and gone up from there.
        krallja 4y ago
        The ENIAC was upgraded to be a stored-program computer after a while, and eventually had 100 words of core memory.
    - antod 4y ago
      Yeah, the 8bit machines I used had 16bit address space. For example from my vague/limited Z80 memories most of the 8bit registers were paired - so if you wanted a 16bit address, you used the pair. To lazy to look it up, but with the Z80 I seem to remember about 7 8bit registers and that allowed 3 pairs that could handle a 16bit value.
- paulmd 4y 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.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Latency may be similar but: 1. Pretty sure IO depth is as high as OSes can make it so small depth only happens on a mostly idle system. 2. Throughput of NVMe is 10x higher than SATA. So in terms of “time to read the whole file” or “time to complete all I/O requests”, it is also meaningfully better from that perspective.
  - WatchDog 4y ago
    > NVMe is actually not any better than SATA SSDs at random/low-queue-depth IO. The fastest NVMe SSD[0] on UserBenchmark appears to be a fair bit faster at 4k random read compared to the fastest SATA SSD[1]. 75 MB/s vs 41.9 MB/s Avg Random 4k Read. 1,419 MB/s vs 431 MB/s Avg Deep queue 4k read Edit: This comment has been edited, originally I was comparing a flash SATA SSD vs an optane nvme drive, which wasn't a fair comparison. [0]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1311638/Samsung-SSD-980-PRO-250GB https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1311638/Samsung-SSD-... [1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1463967/Samsung-SSD-870-EVO-2TB https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1463967/Samsung-SSD-...
- sdenton4 4y 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.
  - rhacker 4y ago
    From the song: > It does all my work without me even askin' It sounds like Wierd Al had the same use case!
dale_glass 4y 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 4y 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.
  - drdaeman 4y ago
    16 GB RAM is above average. I've just opened BestBuy (US, WA, and I'm not logged in so it picked some store in Seattle - YMMV), went to the "All Laptops" section (no filters of any kind) and here's what I get on the first page: 16, 8, 12, 8, 12, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 16, 4, 4, 8. Median value is obviously 8 and mean/average is 8.4. I'd say that's about enough to comfortably use a browser with a few tabs on an otherwise pristine machine with nothing unusual running in background (and I'm not sure about memory requirements of all the typically prenistalled crapware). Start opening more tabs or install some apps and 8GB RAM is going to run out real quick. And it goes as low as 4 - which is a bad joke. That's appropriate only for quite special low-memory uses (like a thin client, preferably based on a special low-resource GNU/Linux distro) or "I'll install my own RAM anyway so I don't care what comes stock" scenario.
    - 4y ago
adam_arthur 4y 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.
bombcar 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y 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)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- icedchai 4y 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 4y 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.
- anthk 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Can confirm my Mac has 64.
NovaVeles 4y 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.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Put Windows/MacOS on it and you'll use 3 GB just booting up :p.
acchow 4y ago
> Interesting point that RAM has basically not moved up in consumer computers in 10+ years... wonder why. Smartphones gradually became the limiting factor
lostgame 4y 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 4y 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.)
  - lostgame 4y ago
    Framework is the only laptop I will consider purchasing in the future, for sure.
- bombcar 4y 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.
AussieWog93 4y 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 4y ago
  https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600X/619vs4084 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-Ryzen-5-5600X/804vs3859 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.
  - CompuHacker 4y ago
    In my experience; UserBenchmark will only show exactly one review per part, usually written early in the lifecycle, and never updated. Sometimes, this is written by random users (older parts), sometimes by staff. All reviews are basically trash, especially staff reviews. Also, data fields like 64-Core Perf were made less prominent on Part Lists and Benchmark Result pages around the time Zen+ and Zen 2 All-Core outperformed comparable Intel parts. 1-Core Perf and 8-Core Perf were prioritized on highly visible pages, putting Intel on top of the default filtered list of CPUs. However, the dataset produced by the millions of benchmarks remains apparently unmolested, and all the data is still visible going back a decade or more, if not slightly obscured by checkboxes and layout changes. (https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1 https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1)
throwawaylinux 4y 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/ 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372 [2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090-3090ti/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...
magicalhippo 4y 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-process-node-highest-density-dram-to-date/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758022

Syonyk 4y 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...

bombcar 4y 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.
- rep_lodsb 4y ago
  Memory addresses were never 8 bits. Some early hobbyist machines might have had only 256 bytes of RAM present, but the address space was always larger.
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    Even the Intel 4004--widely regarded as the first commercial microprocessor--had a 12-bit address space
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      This got me thinking, and I went digging even further into historic mainframes. These rarely used eight-bit bytes, so calculating memory size on them is a little funny. But all had more than 256 bytes. Whirlwind I (1951): 2048 16-bit words, so 4k bytes. This was the first digital computer to use core memory (and the first to operate on more than one bit at a time). EDVAC (designed in 1944): 1024 44 bit-words, so about 5.6k. ENIAC (designed in 1943): No memory at all, at least not like we think of it. So there you go. All but the earliest digital computer used an address space greater than eight bits wide. I'm sure there are some micro controllers and similar that have only eight bit address spaces, but general purpose machines seem to have started at 12-bits and gone up from there.
      - krallja 4y ago
        The ENIAC was upgraded to be a stored-program computer after a while, and eventually had 100 words of core memory.
  - antod 4y ago
    Yeah, the 8bit machines I used had 16bit address space. For example from my vague/limited Z80 memories most of the 8bit registers were paired - so if you wanted a 16bit address, you used the pair. To lazy to look it up, but with the Z80 I seem to remember about 7 8bit registers and that allowed 3 pairs that could handle a 16bit value.
paulmd 4y 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.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Latency may be similar but: 1. Pretty sure IO depth is as high as OSes can make it so small depth only happens on a mostly idle system. 2. Throughput of NVMe is 10x higher than SATA. So in terms of “time to read the whole file” or “time to complete all I/O requests”, it is also meaningfully better from that perspective.
- WatchDog 4y ago
  > NVMe is actually not any better than SATA SSDs at random/low-queue-depth IO. The fastest NVMe SSD[0] on UserBenchmark appears to be a fair bit faster at 4k random read compared to the fastest SATA SSD[1]. 75 MB/s vs 41.9 MB/s Avg Random 4k Read. 1,419 MB/s vs 431 MB/s Avg Deep queue 4k read Edit: This comment has been edited, originally I was comparing a flash SATA SSD vs an optane nvme drive, which wasn't a fair comparison. [0]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1311638/Samsung-SSD-980-PRO-250GB https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1311638/Samsung-SSD-... [1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1463967/Samsung-SSD-870-EVO-2TB https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1463967/Samsung-SSD-...
sdenton4 4y 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.
- rhacker 4y ago
  From the song: > It does all my work without me even askin' It sounds like Wierd Al had the same use case!

dale_glass 4y 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 4y 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.
- drdaeman 4y ago
  16 GB RAM is above average. I've just opened BestBuy (US, WA, and I'm not logged in so it picked some store in Seattle - YMMV), went to the "All Laptops" section (no filters of any kind) and here's what I get on the first page: 16, 8, 12, 8, 12, 4, 4, 4, 4, 8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 16, 4, 4, 8. Median value is obviously 8 and mean/average is 8.4. I'd say that's about enough to comfortably use a browser with a few tabs on an otherwise pristine machine with nothing unusual running in background (and I'm not sure about memory requirements of all the typically prenistalled crapware). Start opening more tabs or install some apps and 8GB RAM is going to run out real quick. And it goes as low as 4 - which is a bad joke. That's appropriate only for quite special low-memory uses (like a thin client, preferably based on a special low-resource GNU/Linux distro) or "I'll install my own RAM anyway so I don't care what comes stock" scenario.
  - 4y ago

adam_arthur 4y 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.

bombcar 4y 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_ 4y 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 4y 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)

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icedchai 4y 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 4y 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.
anthk 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Can confirm my Mac has 64.

NovaVeles 4y 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.

zamadatix 4y ago
Put Windows/MacOS on it and you'll use 3 GB just booting up :p.

acchow 4y ago

> Interesting point that RAM has basically not moved up in consumer computers in 10+ years... wonder why. Smartphones gradually became the limiting factor

lostgame 4y 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 4y 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.)
- lostgame 4y ago
  Framework is the only laptop I will consider purchasing in the future, for sure.
bombcar 4y 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.

AussieWog93 4y 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 4y ago
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-5600X/619vs4084 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-Ryzen-5-5600X/804vs3859 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.
- CompuHacker 4y ago
  In my experience; UserBenchmark will only show exactly one review per part, usually written early in the lifecycle, and never updated. Sometimes, this is written by random users (older parts), sometimes by staff. All reviews are basically trash, especially staff reviews. Also, data fields like 64-Core Perf were made less prominent on Part Lists and Benchmark Result pages around the time Zen+ and Zen 2 All-Core outperformed comparable Intel parts. 1-Core Perf and 8-Core Perf were prioritized on highly visible pages, putting Intel on top of the default filtered list of CPUs. However, the dataset produced by the millions of benchmarks remains apparently unmolested, and all the data is still visible going back a decade or more, if not slightly obscured by checkboxes and layout changes. (https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1 https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1)

throwawaylinux 4y 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/ 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU12/372 [2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090-3090ti/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/30-serie...

magicalhippo 4y 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-process-node-highest-density-dram-to-date/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/micron-unveils-1a-dram... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32758022