dying in 8gb unified ram intensifies
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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8GB of registers.
What it feels like moving from x86 to ARM
The first computer I bought had eight megs of RAM.
I remember being thrilled with a 20 meg scsi hard drive I got as a kid.
Mine got upgraded to a full meg.
The meme don't make sense. An SRAM cache of that size would be so slow that you would most likely save clock cycles reading directly from RAM an not having a cache at all...
Slow? Not necessarily.
The main issue with that much memory is the data routing and the physical locality of the memory. Assuming you (somehow) could shrink down the distance from the cache to the registers and could have a wide enough data line/request lines you can have data from such a cache in ~4 cycles (assuming L1 and a hit).
What slows down memory for L2 is the wider address space and slower residence checks. L3 gets a bit slower because of even wider address spaces but also it has to deal with concurrency issues since it's shared among cores. It also ends up being slower because it physically has to be further away from the cores due to it's size.
If you ever look at a CPU die, you'll see that L1 caches are generally tiny and embedded right into the center of the processor. L2 tends to be bolted onto the sides of the physical cores. And L3 tends to be the largest amount of silicon real estate on a CPU package. This is all what contributes to the increasing fetch performance for each layer along with the fact that you have to check the closest layers first (An L3 hit, for example, means that the CPU checked L1 and L2 and failed at both which takes time. So L3 access will always be at least the L1 + L2 times).
I agree. When evaluating cache access latency, it is important to consider the entire read path rather than just the intrinsic access time of a single SRAM cell. Much of the latency arises from all the supporting operations required for a functioning cache, such as tag lookups, address decoding, and bitline traversal. As you pointed out, implementing an 8 GB SRAM cache on-die using current manufacturing technology would be extremely impractical. The physical size would lead to substantial wire delays and increased complexity in the indexing and associativity circuits. As a result, the access latency of such a large on-chip cache could actually exceed that of off-chip DRAM, which would defeat the main purpose of having on-die caches in the first place.
that much cache could be detrimental to the speed of your CPU
Isn't vram usually bigger than ram? Those pics should be switched.
EDIT: Oh, I took vram to be virtual ram, not video ram. It makes sense for video ram.
Creating your swap as 2x your RAM is outdated advice. Now it's essentially changed to be 2x until 4GB of RAM, then 1x until 8GB, and anything over 8GB just use 4GB of swap because you probably have enough RAM. Or, even some modern systems like Fedora will swap to zRAM. Which is just a highly compressed portion of RAM.
I think that recommendation came partly due to hibernation, where the ram is dumped to disk before powering off. Today, I'd probably use a swapfile instead.
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Normally you don't even have that much virtual ram. It's at most twice your system ram, but honestly past 8gb and you're gonna want to start closing out of stuff.
8gb of VRAM is still pretty good, but 8GB of RAM is getting pretty low these days. 16GB of ram and 6-8 VRAM is pretty common, and even that might go up relatively soon.
If you have an 8GB GPU that's a few years old, it's probably doing okay-ish. It probably doesn't have the performance to really suffer from VRAM limits and you don't game with things like raytracing or ultra detail settings turned on because the GPU isn't fast enough for those things anyway.
My Vega 64 had 8GB VRAM and that was fine.
If you buy one of the new GPUs with 8GB though, the VRAM is a huge problem. You have the GPU power to have all the features turned on, but you're going to see real performance crippled because it overflows VRAM.
Longevity is the other issue - when games released in 2025 run like ass on your 8GB GPU from 2017, you won't be surprised. Bad performance from an 8GB GPU that released in 2025 for $500, that's a problem.
Mine certainly isn't. 6GB vram, 16gb ram.
It depends on your definition of "usually", high end GPUs for data centers, AI, workstations or "enthusiasts" yea. For these applications you're starting at like 16
GPUs for us plebs, no
Tbf, we should be starting with 16GB for gaming GPUs too, especially for those prices. But ... NVidia.
But yeah, modern HPC Processors have at least 48GB or so. And max. is the AMD Mi355X with 288GB VRAM afaik. Which is actually less than my servers RAM, ha! But also probably like a thousand times fasted, considering my RAM runs at 1600 MT/s.
I'm seeing games today regularly hitting 11 GB, and that's without raytracing or frame generation which require more VRAM.
The new 8GB GPU Nvidia just launched is a trap. It exists to trick people into buying a GPU that they'll need to upgrade next year.
It's also fairly cheap to buy 32+ GB of RAM, lots of choices for under $80. Meanwhile, I'm not even sure how you find a video card with 32GB of VRAM (not that you really need this much, 12GB and 16GB are pretty solid for a video card nowadays).
Afaik for consumers only the 5090 has 32GB VRAM. So you're correct, practically impossible to find. And even if you find it, prone to spontaneous combustion.
For servers, it tops out at 288GB currently, with the AMD Mi355X.
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