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That 4gb vram deal sounds ahead of its time. CPU caches are tiered, why not ram? Looking forward to future systems with 8gb ddr6 and 8gb ddr5. "Swapping to ram"
by podocarp 2mo ago
That 4gb vram deal sounds ahead of its time. CPU caches are tiered, why not ram? Looking forward to future systems with 8gb ddr6 and 8gb ddr5. "Swapping to ram" would become a thing.
- kjs3 2mo agoThere are lots of platforms where RAM is tiered, and operating systems that support it. For example, CLX allows for a "NUMA node without CPU" abstraction; there was a HN article recently about Facebook cooking up their own silicon and Linux patches to implement this so they could expand DDR5 platforms with retired DDR4 memory. Not a new idea...20+ years ago I used mc68k & ns32k BSD systems that had a couple of meg of fast memory onboard and more, slower memory hung off a VMEBus. System tried to keep hot pages in fast memory and it worked reasonably well.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoXbox has that right now. Some memory channels have 1GB chips while some have 2GB chips. So part of your memory space uses all channels and part uses more like half. That GPU was much worse though. If that .5GB had been moderately slower it wouldn't have gotten the same attention. But because it was a weird backup path to that segment of memory, on a design that normally runs all segments in parallel, it ran at 1/7 the speed of everything else. Overflowing into it was devastating.