tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on SODIMM-to-DIMM adapters offer a workaround for DDR5 price hikes 11 hours ago:
“Partial workaround” wou’d probably be more accurate. As the article body points out, DDR5 SO-DIMM prices are also up, albeit not as much as DDR5 DIMM prices.
But it’s substantial enough of a price difference to be interesting.
- Submitted 11 hours ago to technology@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 1 day ago:
While I agree that I don’t think that an LLM is going to do the heavy lifting there, I assume that Rust has some way of overriding type-induced checks. If your goal is just to get to a mechanically-equivalent-to-C++ Rust version, rather than making full use of its type system to try to make the code as correct as possible, you could maybe do that. It could provide the benefit of a starting place to start using the type system to do additional checks.
- Comment on Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030 1 day ago:
“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft distinguished engineer Galen Hunt wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 1 day ago:
I mean, efficient in terms of memory utilization, like. Obviously there are gonna be associated costs with having remote compute.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 1 day ago:
Apparently there are m.2 NVMe drives with DRAM caches.
I don’t know if anyone makes a pure DRAM NVMe drive, but if so, on Linux, you could make the block device a swap partition.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 1 day ago:
One of the mechanisms for compressing memory in Linux. Trades CPU time for more effectively having more RAM Recent versions of Fedora apparently have it on by default.
I’ve read that zswap, another mechanism, is preferable on newer systems with SSD; that only compresses pages going to swap.
Probably someone should try benchmarking them for various workloads if systems are going to be running on much less memory for a while. Was more of an edge case thing that not many people cared about, but if operating with less memoey is suddenly more important, might have broader interest.
On Linux, also possible to opt for lighter-on-memory versions of a lot of software that you’re kinda committing to using the Microsoft-provided version of on Windows.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 1 day ago:
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
obsolescence.wixsite.com/…/cpm-internals
CP/M requires a minimum of 20K RAM, although realistically, 48K is the bare minimum. Most systems have the maximum 64K.
Sounds like it can’t address > 2¹⁶ bytes.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
Honestly, it’ll be more efficient to have memory in a datacenter in that hardware in a datacenter will see higher average capacity utilization, but it’s gonna drive up datacenter prices too.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
I donlt think that the NVMe shortage is that big of a deal in terms of using it for swap. It’s much cheaper than DRAM per GB.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
Windows 11 can run on 4GB. That’s the minimum for the listed requirements, and the other day, I saw Best Buy selling a 4GB model, and I see some systems for sale online. I would imagine that it’s not ideal.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
www.microsoft.com/…/windows-11-specifications
Minimum system requirements for Copilot+ PCs
RAM: 16 GB DDR5/LPDDR5
I think that OpenAI has probably kind of bashed a hole in the bottom of Microsoft’s boat on that route.
- Comment on Dell and Lenovo may limit mid-range laptops to 8GB DDR5 RAM in response to rising memory prices 2 days ago:
mid-range laptops to 8GB
My phone has 12GB of memory, and I’m pretty sure that Android is a lot lighter on memory than the Windows 11 that I suspect a lot of these are going to be running.
- Comment on There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM 3 days ago:
Biometrics are irrevocable. If you’re worried about stolen personal data, they are not what I would be moving to.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 4 days ago:
DDR4 RAM is presently cheaper than DDR5, but it has also increased dramatically in price recently.
pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
DDR4:
lemmy.today/…/ed889201-f9e6-46ec-81a8-832f6bfc63e…
DDR5:
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
Ah, thanks. Looks like they enabled zram in Fedora 33:
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated SSD swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn’t actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn’t the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what’s eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I’d expect it to be pretty effective.
dev tasks, builds…etc
I don’t know how applicable it is to your use case, but there’s ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla’s sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven’t used it myself.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
The big unknown that’s been a popular topic of discussion is whether Valve locked in a long-running contract for the hardware before the RAM price increases happened. If they did, then they can probably offer favorable prices, and they’re probably sitting pretty. If not, then they won’t.
My guess is that they didn’t, since:
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They announced that they would hold off on announcing pricing due to still working on figuring out the hardware cost (which I suspect very likely refers to the RAM situation).
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I’d bet that they have a high degree of risk in the number of units that the Steam Machine 2.0 will sell. The Steam Deck was an unexpectedly large success. Steam Machine 1.0 kinda flopped. Steam Machine 2.0 could go down either route. They probably don’t want to contract to have a ton of units built and then have huge oversupply. Even major PC vendors like Dell and Lenovo got blindsided and were unprepared, and I suspect that they’re in a much less-risky position to commit to a given level of sales and doing long-running purchases.
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- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
Honestly, a system with 64GB of memory is pretty well-provisioned compared to a typical prebuilt computer system from a major vendor.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
GPU prices
Outside of maybe iGPUs, I doubt it, because they need their own memory and are constrained by the same bottleneck — DRAM.
Or at least CPU prices?
I’ve read one article arguing that CPU prices will likely drop during the RAM shortage.
I don’t know if that’s actually true — I think that depends very much on the ability of CPU manufacturers to economically scale down their production to match demand, and I don’t know to what degree that is possible. If they need to commit to a given amount of production in advance, then yeah, probably.
Go back a couple years, and DRAM manufacturers — who are currently making a ton of money due to the massive surge in demand from AI — were losing a ton of money, because they couldn’t inexpensively rapidly scale production up and down to match demand, and nobody wanted RAM during COVID-19. I don’t know what the economics are like for CPUs.
…yahoo.com/…/fear-dram-glut-stifling-micron-15595…
November 5, 2018
To be clear, the oversupply concerns that have plagued Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares for weeks now are completely valid. Micron stock has fallen as much as 40% just since June on this deteriorating dynamic.
In short, the world doesn’t need as many memory chips as Micron and rivals like Samsung (OTCMKTS:SSNLF) and SK Hynix are collectively making. The glut is forcing the price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) modules so low that it’s increasingly tougher to make a buck in the business.
We had a glut of DRAM as late as last year:
Weak Demand and Inventory Backlogs
Both the DRAM and the NAND markets are still in a state of oversupply, with excess inventory leading to significant price declines through Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This is driven by multiple factors such as weak consumer demand.
Memory manufacturers ramped up production during previous periods of strong demand, but the market failed to meet these forecasts. This has resulted in inventory backlogs that now weigh on prices.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
That’s fair, but my understanding is that VRChat, despite the name, isn’t a VR-only thing.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they’ve already done the technical work).
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
I haven’t used it, but my understanding is that it’s vaguely like Second Life, popular with folks creating adult-content-oriented-worlds.
From a technical standpoint, that might actually be a pretty good example of a game that would benefit from cloud gaming, since I assume that it’s not all that latency-critical, not the way an FPS would be.
I guess that there would potentially be privacy issues with adult content stuff that would argue against cloud hosting, but in the case of VRChat, the service itself is already living in the cloud, so…shrugs
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
If it’s a leak in a mod and some pages just aren’t being accessed at all, then I’d think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don’t need all that much space to just store swap, and it’s vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128G…
I have no idea the degree to which “lots of cheap, fast swap” helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory.
If flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it’ll probably eat through its life time write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don’t expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
I assume this:
securityweek.com/microsoft-offers-free-windows-10…
The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.
Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.
If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11.
Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store.
“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it?
I’m sure that you could do that, but I think part of the problem there is that everyone else is going to be in the same boat, short of RAM, and I’m not sure what demand there is for a gaming PC stripped of its RAM.
If thwre isn’t much demand, you mgiht have trouble recouping what you spent on the parts you don’t want.
I read one article that CPU prices may drop, because the increased RAM prices will drive up PC prices, price some people out of the market, and so there will be less demand for CPUs.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
thought the later, the better
Well, usually that is true.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
Not a hardware fix, but there’s memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:
xda-developers.com/little-known-windows-feature-h…
Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I’ve mentioned here recently. I don’t know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems wirh SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable.
- Comment on RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders 5 days ago:
As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.
I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they’ve been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned theough an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn’t even get through boot.
12th-gen chips are safe.
