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from the remember-when-a-hard-disk-held-20MB? dept.
Samsung Unveils 32 GB DDR4-2666 SO-DIMMs
Samsung on Wednesday introduced its first consumer products based on its 16 Gb DDR4 memory chips demonstrated earlier this year. The new SO-DIMMs are aimed at high-performance notebooks that benefit from both speed and capacity of memory modules.
Samsung's new 32 GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs based on 16 Gb DDR4 memory ICs (integrated circuits) are rated for a 2666 MT/s data transfer rate at 1.2 V. Because the 16 Gb memory chips are made using Samsung's 10 nm-class process technology, the new module is claimed to be 39% more energy efficient than the company's previous-gen 16 GB SO-DIMM based on 20 nm-class ICs. According to Samsung, a laptop equipped with 64 GB of new memory consumes 4.578 W in active mode, whereas a notebook outfitted with 64 GB of previous-gen DDR4 consumes 7.456 W in active mode.
Insert obligatory ECC comment here.
Samsung press release. Also at Tom's Hardware and DigiTimes.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 04 2018, @11:48AM (5 children)
Computer programs demand more and more memory, all the time. The OS demands more and more memory, all the time. For example, WinXP ran really nice, if you could give it a full gig of memory. It ran well on 512 meg, but could choke on occassion. Try running any late version of Windows on a single gig of memory. It will truly suck.
I've noted a time or two that my "desktop", or whatever you may choose to call it, has 24 gig of memory. It never writes ANYTHING to virtual memory. Browsers, games, newsfeeds, utilities, terminals - they all stay open for weeks at a time, and still it never touches virtual memory. It truly is sweet, never having to wait for something to first, write to disk, then read "memory" from disk. It just never happens here.
32 gig modules? Presumably, laptops will be offered with two or more modules. Holy CRAP! Never, never, never wait for virtual memory!
Sure, some people could load up 32 or 64 gig of memory, and want more. Such people are NOT typical. My son, the mathematician? He's perfectly happy with 32 gig of memory. He doesn't use it all. His primary bottleneck are bus speeds, and secondary bottleneck is CPU speed. I guess on a rare occassion, he uses most of his memory, but he isn't bumping into his upper limit on a regular basis.
Personally, I've never used a laptop that had enough memory. At best, laptops seem to have barely adequate memory. The only more or less legitimate use of virtual memory on a laptop, is the sleep feature.
I could be motivated to invest in a real laptop, given all of that memory space!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @01:05PM (2 children)
Invest?
Pray tell, what exactly is what you'll do that will recoup that money that you "invested"?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 04 2018, @02:37PM
I mean "invest" in a similar manner to sport divers who invest in bigger, lighter, aluminum air tanks. Or, mountain climbers invest in higher quality rope, pitons, and carabiners. I don't use a computer to make my living, but I'm willing to "invest" in something that can be compared to my desktop. 32 gig of ram, and an octocore CPU, with a sweet Nvidia 1080? It may not exactly keep up with my server which serves as a desktop, but it would be in the ballpark. Then again, applications optimized to make full use of that GPU would fly, better than my twelve core rig, sporting a 3 generations old GPU.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 04 2018, @05:31PM
My former job would "invest" into giving us the ability to manipulate or compile the latest FPGAs on our laptops. 32G was required three years ago, 64GB would clearly help today.
Obviously, the other parameter, processor speed, has not doubled in the last three years, so an actual compile would be insanely long (overnight to multiple days) and only for major issues, but at least analyzing and tweaking the results would benefit from more elbow room.
The beefy compile server at the factory is not always reachable, often by design (.mil customers).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 04 2018, @05:30PM
My desktops have a minimum of 32 GB of memory. But no Swap. I don't want swapping putting wear on the SSDs. I'm coming up on 3 years of no swap. Works perfectly. If for some reason I ever needed swap, I could create a swap file. It would be as efficient as a partition because SSD has no seek or rotational latency. Every sector is as near as every other.
I start using memory if I run VMs. Or if I run a certain Java program that parses huge data files creating a model in memory.
My Pixelbook has 8 GB memory. The Ubuntu on it has 11 GB of swap, just in case -- because I occasionally might launch Eclipse and related programs on it. But I don't treat it as a development machine.
As for programs demanding more and more memory, they also demand more and more cpu cycles. There's a reason for that. Software is getting far more sophisticated. There is a huge difference in features between Notepad and LibreOffice Writer. Or between Notepad and Eclipse. Writer and Eclipse can edit text, but each brings a vast feature set. Things we now take for granted. Spell checking as you type. And as you type in your source code.
Or Excel takes so much more memory than Lotus 123. But modern Excel has way more features and sophistication.
Developers put more into software. Making it bigger and slower. People like the features, but pay for it with Moore's Law.
As long as my SSDs don't begin developing a vibration, I won't worry about it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:28PM
When I built my most recent computer earlier this year, I just maxed it out at 64GB and turned off swap and figured I'd never have to worry about running out of memory. It would be nice to have a laptop with the same amount of memory.