4 ms·

Why not go directly to the source article that has a lot more details? https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/29/zuck-saves-meta-bucks-by-reusing-memory-f

• embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > Why not go directly to the source article Which seems to be the sister site of Register; https://www.blocksandfiles.com/architecture/2026/06/26/panmnesia-boosts-cxl-scale-with-fabric-switching-meta-repurposes-old-dram-with-cxl/5263151 https://www.blocksandfiles.com/architecture/2026/06/26/panmn...
• pjc50 3mo ago
  Source paper linked is https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_camera_ready.pdf https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_cam... 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.
  • herodoturtle 3mo ago
    > and contains significant embedded carbon emissions Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above? Genuinely curious :)
    • lmz 3mo ago
      "a lot of carbon was emitted while making it"
    • NDlurker 3mo ago
      Reduce, reuse, recycle
    • pjc50 3mo ago
      From the paper: "Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memory is one of the largest single embodied-emissions contributors" [8] U. Gupta, M. Elgamal, G. Hills, G.-Y. Wei, H.-H. S. Lee, D. Brooks, and C.-J. Wu, “ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems with an Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’22), 2022. [4] D. Azevedo, M. Patterson, J. Pouchet, and R. Tipley, “Carbon usage effectiveness (cue): A green grid data center sustainability metric,” White paper, vol. 32, 2010. [33] J. Wang, D. S. Berger, F. Kazhamiaka, C. Irvene, C. Zhang, E. Choukse, K. Frost, R. Fonseca, B. Warrier, C. Bansal, J. Stern, R. Bianchini, and A. Sriraman, “Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon,” in Proceedings of the 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ser. ISCA ’24, 2025, p. 452–470. Not a reference, but I found https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emission-explorer https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emis... which goes into great detail on the subject. I hadn't realized there were significant emissions of fluorinated gases directly from the fabs, which is mildly alarming. Although it looks like there has been a crackdown on this either politically or through ESG policies.
      • yieldcrv 3mo ago
        > recycle pls > not like that this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process
        • pjc50 3mo ago
          What do you mean by "not like that"?
          • yieldcrv 3mo ago
            The RAM has been recycled but it has worse emissions than throwing it away and using newer RAM
    • ryukoposting 3mo ago
      I see what you did there.
    • Barbing 3mo ago
      Settle a debate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 :)
  • jonhohle 3mo ago
    I’ve wanted this for a long time and it seems to reemerge during RAM boom cycles and then disappear during busts. I have 32GB of DDR3 that would be great for scratch space or cache of i could throw it on a card.
• ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
  It is amazing how this is attributed to "zuck", like he actually knows these things.
  • rob74 3mo ago
    That's just El Reg being El Reg (the Zuck-buck rhyme was apparently too good to pass up). But it's a far cry from their glory days, when they coined nicknames like "The Beast of Redmond" for Microsoft or "Chipzilla" for Intel...
• Cuuugi 3mo ago
  The writers name is Maxwell Cooter, which made me giggle.