Comment on The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day agoI’m not sure you’re caught up to current events. DDR3, from 2007, is making a comeback because of supply shortages of newer RAM. New modern motherboards are being manufactured that can take this old RAM because its available and still cheap enough.
null@lemmy.org 22 hours ago
What good is all that (slow) RAM if you’re stuck with an equally slow CPU?
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Its not an equally slow CPU. These boards support Xeon CPUs that first launched 11 years after DDR3.
The implication is that there are users needing large RAM footprints that aren’t CPU bound. The hit in performance on the RAM isn’t significant enough to justify spending orders of magnitude more for modern DDR5 which is in short supply.
In computing history there’s precedent for this. Amiga computers had a small amount of “Fast RAM” which was extremely expensive, but the CPU cloud address a second bank of “Chip RAM” which was significantly slower but much much cheaper.
We could see this idea return in modern computers.