Thread

1. torutofu · 1790945970 · focus · HN ↗

   yeah, at some point memory footprint becomes an architectural constraint again, not just a number you throw more hardware at.

   1. jeffbee · 1790949585 · focus · HN ↗

      The memory capacity wall has been coming at us at high speed in plain sight for decades. We've been ignoring it.

      1. ajross · 1790952176 · focus · HN ↗

         Not sure I buy that? There's a hardware/process argument that DRAM scaling is hitting a wall (for largely the same reason that logic scaling is, even though the fabs are different).

         But DRAM has always been almost completely dominated by consumer device needs, and consumer requirements leveled off hard maybe a decade ago. Once you had a 4G system, things were mostly OK. Pervasive VM use and general bloat pushed that up by maybe a factor of two or three since, but that's it.

         AI is different. It wants that capacity for different reasons and puts it in different places. And almost none of us really saw that coming more than ~18 months ago or so. Certainly not to the extend that you'd conclude "we've been ignoring it".

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