Computer RAM gets biggest upgrade in 25 years but it may be too little, too late — LPCAMM2 won’t stop Apple, Intel and AMD from integrating memory directly on the CPU::LPCAMM2 is a revolution in RAM, but it faces an uphill struggle
both techniques will obviously need to coexist for some time. they dont have logistics on large memory near the processor,. quite yet, so there is still a place for ram.
I’d argue that they do have the logistics down pretty well at this point as HBM3E can squeeze 144Gb onto a package.
Also, lots of users aren’t gonna want the main system memory on the CPU die. Aside from the fact that it creates a clear path for vendors to artificially inflate prices through pretended scarcity via product segmentation and bundles, it also prevents the end users from upgrading the machines.
I’m pretty sure this even goes against the stated goals of the EU in terms of reduction of e-waste.
I have no doubt that a handful of vendors cooperating could restrict their offer and force the hand of end users, but I don’t think this would be here to stay. Unless it provides such a drastic performance boost (like 2x or more) that it could have enough incentive to convince the masses.
People who really care about computers buy handmade artisanal transistors.
I know you’re kidding, but: http://www.homebrewcpu.com/
This is the future of PC, but with soldered RAM: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_1
On CPU is definitely superior for performance, and what I’m not seeing people consider here is a future where you have On-CPU-RAM and On-Motherboard-RAM. CPU RAM for intense CPU functions, and traditionally seated RAM to be more like a modern “swap” I suppose, but instead of using the slower disks for swap, you’re just using slower RAM.
I could especially see this in Enterprise level hardware. I’m just saying, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Por Que No Los Dos?
I know, I know, you can’t expect corporations to do squat to benefit the consumer, but one can hope.
Yeah, there is no way they’re gonna put 1TB of RAM on a CPU die anytime soon.
Does that mean that consumer hardware will include expandable RAM though? I feel like for the average person, that option still has a very high chance of disappearing on a lot of machines.
Oh yeah, a very high chance of disappearing. The unfortunate reality is probably 80% of people never upgrade their laptops or desktops. Building and maintaining your own PC has become more en vogue in recent years, but the vast majority of average consumers just don’t take part in the practice. Thus, it will not be prioritized by the industry. Why spend money on making your machines upgrade-able if the majority of users don’t ever take advantage of the feature?
I don’t like why it will happen, but I understand the economics of it.
Question: modern systems can mount hundreds of GB or even terabytes of RAM, right? At this point, why not mount non-volatile storage as RAM? Performance should increase since data wouldn’t have to be loaded.
Essentially we do. If you run out of RAM, you get pages from disk. You would know this if you ever used Windows ME.
From the perspective of a computer engineer SSDs are painfully slow. Waiting for data on disk is slow enough that it is typically done by asking the OS for the data and having the OS schedule another process onto the CPU while it waits. RAM is also slow although not nearly as slow. Ideally you want your data in the L1 cache which is fast enough to minimally stall the CPU. The L2 and L3 caches are slower but larger and more likely to have the data you want. If the caches are empty and you have to read RAM your CPU will either do a lot of speculative execution or more likely stall.
Speculative execution on CPUs is a desperate attempt to deal with the fact that all memory access is slow by just continuing through the code as if you know what is in memory. If the speculative execution is wrong a lot of work gets thrown out (hopefully nothing unsound happens) and the delay is more noticable.
Bluntly an SSD only system would probably be an order of magnitude slower. I’m also not sure switching to a new process (or even thread) to load from SSD would be viable without RAM as it would likely invalidate a lot of cache triggering more loads.
We already have memory wafers glued to our CPU wafers in the form of L3 cache. It’s lower latency, higher throughput, up to a few hundred MiB in bigger models and can potentially be used without external RAM sticks (but I’ve not heard of using that feature outside of BIOS firmware early boot – that’s probably the only change we’ll see). Sometimes it’s DRAM, sometimes it’s SRAM, its size varies quite a bit.
Wouldn’t RAM on die mean lower wafer yield?
This is about RAM on the package not RAM on the die. It honestly makes no sense why we don’t have CPUs and RAM soldered to the motherboard right next to the CPU package. I love being able to change the stuff myself, but any reasonable repair shop could be doing that for you and we can have much higher performance than we currently have. It’s not like there’s really many viable options anyways. AMD has what four good CPUs intel has like two, and there’s two good ram ICS.
Why would you think soldering would increase performance vs socketed at all much less provide “much higher performance”
If soldered was the only option ans 6 skud was enough for everyone everyone would have to buy very expensive hardware to increase one spec instead of smart people getting to mix match and upgrade.
Because it’s true. Soldering the memory right next to the CPU allows us to run the memory at a lower voltage and faster clock rate, while getting lower latency too. The LPDDR4/5X are designed based around these improvements. GPUs have been doing this forever too for the same reasons. It’s a huge upgrade in every way except upgradability, which is effectively eliminated.
