'Consider a system with no DRAM' replaced by a 'recycling fiber loop': John Carmack envisages bold future to avoid AI-driven RAM crisis

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• just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨33⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  This is… incredibly stupid. This man has done so many drugs he no longer realizes how computers or electricity works.

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  • Shadow@lemmy.ca ⁨29⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

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    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      The lack of investment in more production capacity for RAM is based on a roughly 3-year horizon for this insane extra AI demand.

      Creating workable consumer-grade alternatives with delay line memory of all things would take longer than that, and the market would collapse the moment AI demand for RAM dried up. This is one of those things that is theoretically possible but due to both technology and market conditions will absolutely not be a thing.

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    • just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      It’s not that we don’t know what it is, it, again, is just INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID.

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• edgemaster72@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  and then the datacenters adopt that tech and hoard it all too

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  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    That’s the idea. It’s pretty worthless for home use, but for AI workloads, it might make sense, the problem is that it’s not quite scalable yet.

    Essentially, if you’ve got 256Tb/s going over 200km of fiber, that means that there’s quite literally 32,000,000,000 bytes (32GB) “in flight”, living on the fiber at any period of time.

    So it’s essentially it’s a revolving sushi belt of bytes, roughly as large as London (inside M25), moving at nearly the speed of light.

    Of course, it doesn’t have to be the size of London. You could wind it into something about the size of a softball. Theoretically.

    It’s a cool idea and Carmack is no doubt a brilliant man. It seems far fetched but it’s kind of been done before… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

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  • mrnobody@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Then all the necessary mineral prices will shoot up 3,648%.

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• solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Delay line memory in gigabytes? Bold indeed.

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• sepi@piefed.social ⁨33⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  Random Access how?

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• RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  I’m pretty sure 200km of fibre isn’t going to be cheap either

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  • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨31⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Fibre is just strands of extruded glass; one of the most common substances on earth.

    Sure beats the blood minerals needed for memory, and to scale up, you just extrude longer strands.

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    could be cheaper than enterprise grade DIMMs.

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  • e8CArkcAuLE@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    there is a bit of surplus of fibre wire in Ukraine, i hear… /s

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    • UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      I’m not sure which job sounds less appealing; collecting it or splicing it

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  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Probably cheaper than tens of thousands of satellites.

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• geekwithsoul@piefed.social ⁨38⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  I don’t pretend to understand how this would actually work, but wouldn’t this essentially be like token ring networking but used as memory?

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  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨29⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    It’s delay line memory. It was common back in the days of vacuum tube computers.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Note that this is from last month, though I haven’t seen it submitted.

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