Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.
Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage
tal
joined 2 years ago
The local pol said he usually goes by Adolf Uunona in daily life and argued it’s too late to formally change his name.
“It’s in all official documents. It’s too late for that,” he told German newspaper Bild in 2020.
For context for folks in the US, the US makes it pretty easy to change your name. Ditto for a number of other countries that derive from the British legal tradition. A number of countries have considerably more restrictive law on this point.
If consumers aren't going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.
I remember when it wasn't uncommon to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately upgrade its memory with third party DIMMs to avoid paying the PC manufacturer's premium on memory. Seeing that price relationship becoming inverted is a little bonkers (Though IIRC Framework's memory-on-prebuilt-systems didn't have much of a premium.)
I also wonder if it will push the market further towards systems with soldered memory or on-core memory.
You can have applications where wall clock tine time is not all that critical but large model size is valuable, or where a model is very sparse, so does little computation relative to the size of the model, but for the major applications, like today's generative AI chatbots, I think that that's correct.
Last I looked, a few days ago on Google Shopping, you could still find some retailers that had stock of DDR5 (I was looking at 2x16GB, and you may want more than that) and hadn't jacked their prices up, but if you're going to buy, I would not wait longer, because if they haven't been cleaned out by now, I expect that they will be soon.
Thanks for the added insights! I haven't used it myself, so appreciated.
Linux has a second, similar "compressed memory" feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.
https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/
Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you're running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I'm wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.
Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.
TECO's kinda-sorta emacs's parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi's parent.
I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.
It's a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel's already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.
Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name "compcache" ("compressed cache"). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]
Open-source RAM is better.
https://lemmy.today/post/42588975
If that's true, I doubt that they're going to be coming to earth for long.