
Thanks for the memory: How cheap RAM changes computing - rbanffy
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/10/how-cheap-ram-changes-computing/
======
baldfat
Commodore 64 RAM Disk. I remember having 64k of RAM soldered on a generic
bread board with a 9V battery as backup. It made the computer ridiculously
fast when you had slow floppy drives for I/O. I also made it work for the
Amega but the payoff was much lower and I stopped using it because the floppy
drive and hard drives were faster and the bottle neck was at the CPU.

Video Production - If I could store my video projects in a RAM Disk it really
would be pretty amazing. The issue is SSD have really been able to speed up
the input so much that the benefit would be much smaller. In video your write
to disk is actually very small and usually only happens while you import,
preview or render (Which is faster on GPU RAM). There is a lot of work to get
a production RAM Disk up and being ready with a low benefit. It still would be
nice to have all my clips just reside in Ram and able to "real time" render
with less stutters on previews.

Data "Science" \- I most use R and that is 100% in memory so it certainly has
been a boom for that in my own usage. 64 GB of RAM is pretty cheap and then I
can also use Spark if it isn't enough. My current biggest time restraint for
big data sets is getting the sets more then anything else. Having large data
sets reside in a RAM Disk would really speed things up but we now have Spark
for the actual big data sets.

~~~
specialist
_" Commodore 64 RAM Disk"_

Oh man.

I manually stuffed 1.5mb (three 512mb RAM cards) for an image capture system.
My thumbs got blisters. The PC was an over clocked Tandy 80286 (8 mhz!). I
forget the name of the goofy Lotus/Intel/Microsoft memory expander
contraption. That Tandy was a tank.

We were doing large format image capture for document archival. Totally not
worth it. Results were unusable. But we had investers, so...

Before that, I thought I was pretty cool pimping my Apple //e with an 80
column character display and 128kb RAM. True word processing, WYSIWYG.

~~~
yuhong
EMS

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imaginenore
Used server RAM has been ridiculously cheap. You can get 256GB for $383:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/256GB-64x4GB-
PC3-10600R-DDR3-1333-EC...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/256GB-64x4GB-
PC3-10600R-DDR3-1333-ECC-Reg-Server-Memory-RAM-Upgrade-Kit-/222094055013)

128GB for $144:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/128GB-32x4GB-
DDR3-PC3-10600R-Server-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/128GB-32x4GB-
DDR3-PC3-10600R-Server-Memory-RAM-Upgrade-
IBM-X3690-X5-Type-7148-/201590917423)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
Server grade everything is ridiculously cheap. Unfortunately, the motherboards
seem to still be expensive.

I bought a botherboard with two LGA2011 sockets for £35 and built a system
around it for only about £100, which included 32GB of RAM and 2 8-core xeons.
Unfortunately, the motherboard was faulty, and I have been unable to find a
repacement for a reasonable price.

~~~
imaginenore
Here's one for $200:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Genuine-Dell-
Precision-T7610-Ser...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Genuine-Dell-
Precision-T7610-Server-Motherboard-Dual-LGA2011-Sockets-NK70N-/262308901765)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
Thanks, although I'm looing for <£40 ideally. They do come up around that
price occasionally.

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melling
You'll see people complaining about memory usage for editors and IDE's. A few
years ago it was Emacs, "the memory hog". Today it's Atom.

The usual complaint is often "you shouldn't need a modern computer to use an
editor".

What people fail to realize is that Moore's Law and memory eventually make the
problem go away. Spend a little extra on memory today and don't make memory
requirements a deciding factor.

~~~
nine_k
If you need _an_ editor, use notepad.exe, nano, or an equivalent.

You run emacs / vim / sublime / atom exactly because it's _much more_ than a
simple text editor, it's a development environment of sorts.

~~~
melling
Why wouldn't use simply use the editor you leave open on your desktop for the
"small editor" tasks?

What kind of person says "this is a job for nano, while this is a job for
emacs?"

~~~
yumaikas
I have a very specific example of jobs for nano vs vim. When I need to copy
paste some code into a server and I don't have clipboard access over ssh, nano
is better for that than vim, because vim tends to keep tabs indented, so I'll
use nano to paste the file into, and then go into vim to edit it. I'm sure
there are other examples.

~~~
OMGWTF
Use ":set paste" before you paste. (Disable with ":set nopaste".)

See also: [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Toggle_auto-
indenting_for_code_pas...](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Toggle_auto-
indenting_for_code_paste#Paste_toggle)

Or, if your terminal emulator supports "bracketed paste", use something like
this: [https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed-
paste](https://github.com/ConradIrwin/vim-bracketed-paste)

------
jon_richards
I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen consoles that store the entire game in
RAM yet. Load times for consoles are absolutely insane.

~~~
pjc50
O tempora, O mores: consoles used to store the entire game in ROM. Up to about
64Mb.

The modern need for patches and DLC makes that impossible now, in addition to
the other reasons. But I think it would still be possible to greatly improve
load times with a bit of optimisation - it's just not commercially important.
Maybe if the console QA system imposed maximum load times it would be
different - but then you'd see compromises made elsewhere, such as in level
size.

(I play Cities:Skylines, where one of the more popular mods is simply called
"Don't Crash", which lazy-loads other mod data to improve performance and
reliability)

~~~
CJefferson
Remember that the 3DS is still very successful, and runs just off carts (well,
also downloadable titles). It seems to run very smoothly.

In practice, there have been a few games that have had patches released -- in
almost all modern games a tiny fraction of the game is code, which can be
easily replaced, leaving all the art and music which (hopefully) don't need as
much patching.

~~~
rakoo
Games on the 3DS aren't typically renowned for their over-the-top graphism
quality in the overall videogame scene; if you expected the same quality with
the same resolution on the desktop, then you'd be doing what pjc50 said:
compromises

~~~
digi_owl
Frankly the focus on graphics have long since reached the point of wankery.

~~~
rakoo
That's your opinion. Graphics is also not the thing I'm most interested in,
but let's not think that we are a realistic view of the overall market.

~~~
bartread
Sad but true. Too many beautifully rendered games that aren't terribly
engaging because amazing graphics are what the mainstream market demands.
(I've avoided buying the latest gen consoles partly because of this, but
mostly because I just don't get the time to play games that much these days.)

That being said there are also many beautiful games that are amazingly fun,
and the graphics do add to the experience, but they're more like the icing on
the cake. That's not quite the metaphor I'm groping for, but you get the idea:
the gameplay is a fundamental that has to be right, and then the graphics can
really add something; without the gameplay the experience is always destined
to be flat.

------
shishiwakamaru
"Presented by SAP"

"SAP HANA is the in-memory computing platform that enables you to accelerate
business processes, deliver more intelligence, and simplify your IT
environment"

~~~
bluedino
Completely useless article. Random publicity shots of data centers/super
computers, no content...

~~~
digi_owl
I really miss the days of Hannibal.

~~~
sciurus
For anyone confused, digi_owl is referring to Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, the co-
founder of Ars Technica who left the site in 2011. He wrote the sort of
deeply-technical content that this article, well, isn't.

[http://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/](http://arstechnica.com/author/hannibal/)

~~~
Cyph0n
How about John Siracusa?

~~~
digi_owl
Article after article of Apple wankery, thanks but no thanks...

------
krzyk
Unfortunately RAM is not cheap, prices are at the same level for years now
with no visible end to this trend.

------
jagermo
I love getting ram on the cheap. I don't really use it, but just having an
insane amount of it is so satisfying.

Star Citizen will probably get its own ram disk, if priced keep on dropping

