3 ms·
> Sometimes you just need the space and not the speed. Your computer already supports that. It's called "swap".
by haroldp 2mo ago
> Sometimes you just need the space and not the speed.
Your computer already supports that. It's called "swap".
- OJFord 2mo agoYeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now - I can't imagine my M4 Mac having a slightly older version RAM would meaningfully affect me, but another 24GB of it (or whatever I have) would certainly be an improvement. CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.
- icedchai 2mo agoIt probably would. LPDDR5 memory bandwidth on M-series Macs is several multiples of the memory bandwidth available on DDR3 (depending on the exact chip, Pro, Max, etc... 4x to beyond 10x.) The whole system would be much, much slower.
- haroldp 2mo ago> Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now USB would be the limiter for both.
- __david__ 2mo agoThey obviously did not mean not literal USB, just a standardized connector across DRAM versions/speeds.
- haroldp 2mo agoYeah, sure but... if it's real fast, lets connect SSDs to it and have real fast swap. Whatever it is will be limited to the bus speed. And that's gonna be silly compared to RAM speed.
- OJFord 2mo agoI didn't say anything about USB? If you're referring to upthread wanting RAM to be standardised like USB (not standardised on something like USB), I took that to mean backwards compatible slots. (And maybe handicapped forwards compatibility, though why would you.) M.2/PCIe is this way.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoA better SSD can get up to a passable GB/s rate, but when you're waiting tens of microseconds instead of tens of nanoseconds you can't use it the same way. And a worse SSD is 10x slower in GB/s too, compared to old super cheap RAM.
- astrobe_ 2mo agoYou don't need swap, you need "apps" that take back the "memory is cheap anyway" crappy culture.