"The RAM wall", and obsolescence

[2is]

I agree to disagree.

Tell me if I'm not being clear enough. I even quoted your post to avoid confusion as to which post in particular I was replying to.

You said I was hostile in my "initial" response to you. My initial response was post #36 but you quoted post #43


Not that it matters [to me] one way or the other.

 

[2is]

Almost every upgrade I have done is for CPU reasons.

Anything a P4 could do remotely well it could do with 2GB of memory. My parents' desktop from 2002 had W7 x86 with 1.25GB, and it spent most of the time waiting for the P4 1.8A to catch up. My netbook has 2GB, and has the same issue. If I could have doubled the CPU power, things would have run nearly twice as fast.

My Q8200 with 4GB memory could not play SC2 adequately, so I got an i5. I have 16GB in it only because it was cheap; the CPU (slow cores) was the main issue.

My old Dell laptop from 2003 has 2GB memory and also spent a lot of time waiting for the mobile P4 2.2 to do anything.

Not many tasks use a crapload of memory without being significantly influenced by the CPU.

By the time your browser is using a lot of memory, there are probably so many tabs that a P4 (let alone 700MHz P3) would choke on the scripts before memory became an issue.

CPU and RAM bottlenecks were much easier to hit in the past with even mundane tasks (the OS alone could tie up much of your memory or CPU power...swap files!). Most people now are either constrained by fixed storage speeds or the CPU.

I agree with this assessment. It's not unlike the lower end video cards that come with more VRAM than the GPU can ever adequately take advantage of. There are so many components in a computer that any one can at some point be the bottleneck. I think for the most part, most, if not all platforms are pretty well balanced in that, if you are approaching a "RAM limitation" you are more than likely going to hit other limitations around the same time. There are obviously exceptions, but that's what they are, exceptions.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I agree with this assessment. It's not unlike the lower end video cards that come with more VRAM than the GPU can ever adequately take advantage of. There are so many components in a computer that any one can at some point be the bottleneck. I think for the most part, most, if not all platforms are pretty well balanced in that, if you are approaching a "RAM limitation" you are more than likely going to hit other limitations around the same time. There are obviously exceptions, but that's what they are, exceptions.

I did specifically mention "non-gaming" loads in my OP. Gaming is highly CPU and GPU dependent, and generally does run out of CPU on a certain platform, in order to drive the newest GPU, before running out of RAM.

But imagine if you take gaming out of the equation. Those boxes could serve as web-browser rigs well into the future... well, as long as they don't run out of RAM doing that.

 

[2is]

I understand that. I'm not talking about gaming either. I used the video cards just as an example since they are kind of like a self contained computer on their own right. I was merely illustrating how the processor (GPU) can easily become the bottleneck before running out of memory can.

With that said, I will partially retract one of my previous comments. I have once had to upgrade a computer because I was limited by how much memory I could use. It was my home/media server running SBS 2008 that maxed out at 4GB. With that said, it wasn't so much a "platform" issue as it was using a low end board with only two dimm slots. I swapped it with another board using the same Intel chipset with 4 DIMM slots and added two more sticks.

I also have a couple fully functional P4 systems laying around with 2GB of ram that are not used for gaming. They're actually not used for anything. My main issue with those is the processor speed and IO speeds. RAM is actually the least of my performance problems with them. Even for web stuff, it's not good enough. THe hardware does not support hardware acceleration for flash, so everything is bound to the CPU which makes smooth 1080p playback impossible and browsing flash heavy websites painful.

 

[SPBHM]

my PII supports up to 768MB, but the CPU is so slow, and ATA33 is not great... so I hardly see memory as a limitation for using this old machine right now (when 512mb became necessary, it was already to slow as a CPU)... I don't think that using the max supported memory, or even more, would have extended the life of that machine.

even my Athlon 64 running windows 8, for basic usage, I cannot see a difference between using 2GB or all the DDR2 I have here (5GB)

 

[beginner99]

You could load a Linux OS that is light on RAM and use that for older comps. A P4 is a bit clunky, but it runs Linux just fine with a decent drive.

Windows just has a bunch of bloat that doesn't need to be there. Linux would be great on old systems.

this. My single-core atom netbook only became usable after putting linux on it. And now and then i still use it and yes also to web browse like here. And it's fine with 1 GB of RAM however the rendering of web pages (CPU) is a lot slower than on my desktop and it can barley play 720p (frame drops, but watchable) and 1080p doesn't work.

 

[Fx1]

no consumer computer supports 128GB

and the point is that ram limitations are often the reason that a system becomes obsolete, more than CPUs nowadays.

like how i was ok with my Q6600, but needed more than the 8gb my p5k supported

which is why i did not buy a consumer computer to replace it

I have 6GB in my i7 950 and there is nothing that i cant do with 6GB.

What on earth would my home PC need 32GB for? The PC will be on ebay long before then

 

[Idontcare]

I've been doing a little bit of thinking about this, and have come to the conclusion, that for NON-GAMING tasks, what really makes computers become obsolete, is often not the CPU, but the total RAM capacity that the hardware will handle, relative to the needs of the OS and software run on it.

For example, lets look at the Pentium III CPU. You could likely, in theory, run Win7 32-bit on it, if only if the motherboard/chipset in question would support enough RAM.

Modern web browsing also takes a lot of RAM. As well as CPU. (Assume that in the case of the P3, we have installed a flash- and ad-blocker.)

Yeah it is definitely an artificially created handicap of the platform, not the CPU as you say, that in the end becomes a problem.

You use web-browsing as an example, another member mentioned their Q6600 mobo limiting them to 8GB (just 2GB per core, bad mojo there for many apps that would actually use 4 cores).

I have experienced the same platform limitations. The Q6600 is my most recent example, same 8GB limit because of chipset support, but it was a problem with my earlier rigs as well.

In my case though I tended to view the platform-imposed ram limit as a chance to upgrade, so it never really bothered me that the obsolescence of my hardware was at the hands of an entirely arbitrary and artificial limitation in the platform's supported ram capacity.

 

[fuzzymath10]

The cases where I think running out of RAM upgrade room would be an issue are also tied to what I would consider professional/commercial situations where at the same time, the CPU would be obsolete. For example, I use actuarial software whose requirement has increased from 1GB per core a couple of years ago to 2-4GB now. At the same time, the vendor has gone from recommending Q9xxx CPUs to IVB or SB-E, at the desktop level (not including grid computing farms). So even if you could use 16GB memory, you're still bottlenecking at the CPU level by a factor of ~2 with no real solution other than a platform upgrade where the memory upgrade would probably be cheaper anyway. Maybe today's CPUs are fast enough even if they're 5+ years old that this isn't generally a problem, but using P3 and P4 as examples is pushing it (and ad-blockers and disabling flash are bandaid solutions). I cannot think of one realistic example where I'd choose a single core P4 with any amount of RAM vs a Core 2 Duo with 2GB, or even 1GB.

If the RAM limitation is only an issue for "edge use" programs, that's not a huge deal and I would just relegate the machine to other tasks. Failing that, then I'd give up and either use an older or alternative OS with the associated drawbacks.

The majority of casual users (other than those with a macbook air) have low CPU pegging and ram requirements because they're spending forever waiting for their spinning hard drives to load stuff.

 

[Turbonium]

Almost every upgrade I have done is for CPU reasons.

Anything a P4 could do remotely well it could do with 2GB of memory. My parents' desktop from 2002 had W7 x86 with 1.25GB, and it spent most of the time waiting for the P4 1.8A to catch up. My netbook has 2GB, and has the same issue. If I could have doubled the CPU power, things would have run nearly twice as fast.

My Q8200 with 4GB memory could not play SC2 adequately, so I got an i5. I have 16GB in it only because it was cheap; the CPU (slow cores) was the main issue.

My old Dell laptop from 2003 has 2GB memory and also spent a lot of time waiting for the mobile P4 2.2 to do anything.

Not many tasks use a crapload of memory without being significantly influenced by the CPU.

By the time your browser is using a lot of memory, there are probably so many tabs that a P4 (let alone 700MHz P3) would choke on the scripts before memory became an issue.

CPU and RAM bottlenecks were much easier to hit in the past with even mundane tasks (the OS alone could tie up much of your memory or CPU power...swap files!). Most people now are either constrained by fixed storage speeds or the CPU.

Funny that you mentioned the P4 1.8A - my dad's previous computer had the exact same CPU. And like you, I found it to be a bit of a bottleneck when running anything like Flash or many tabs at once, even without Flash. The thing is, I think the i845 board supported up to a P4 2.4GHz 400FSB, so assuming I upgraded the CPU to that for say 10-15 bucks, I think it would have been fast enough to be acceptable (33% faster clock speed, so I'm guessing roughly 25% faster overall). And by acceptable, I really do mean "good enough" (I'm typing this out on an AMD C-60 running at 1GHz, which I find acceptable - and surely a 2.4 GHz P4 is at least as fast as this CPU).

So again, the limitation would fall on the 2GB of RAM, which I consider to be a bit of an issue with Windows 7 (this netbook has 4GB of RAM... if it had 2GB, I probably wouldn't find Windows 7 to be tolerable). I'm not basing this conclusion on experience with 2GB on a Windows 7 system though - I'm just assuming it based on having used Windows 7 on 3GB and 4GB systems only.

 

[2is]

Funny that you mentioned the P4 1.8A - my dad's previous computer had the exact same CPU. And like you, I found it to be a bit of a bottleneck when running anything like Flash or many tabs at once, even without Flash. The thing is, I think the i845 board supported up to a P4 2.4GHz 400FSB, so assuming I upgraded the CPU to that for say 10-15 bucks, I think it would have been fast enough to be acceptable (33% faster clock speed, so I'm guessing roughly 25% faster overall). And by acceptable, I really do mean "good enough" (I'm typing this out on an AMD C-60 running at 1GHz, which I find acceptable - and surely a 2.4 GHz P4 is at least as fast as this CPU).

So again, the limitation would fall on the 2GB of RAM, which I consider to be a bit of an issue with Windows 7 (this netbook has 4GB of RAM... if it had 2GB, I probably wouldn't find Windows 7 to be tolerable). I'm not basing this conclusion on experience with 2GB on a Windows 7 system though - I'm just assuming it based on having used Windows 7 on 3GB and 4GB systems only.

Lots of baseless guesswork going on there.

 

[Turbonium]

Lots of baseless guesswork going on there.

The board did support only up to a 2.4GHz P4.

I could get a 2.4GHz P4 for 10-15 bucks.

My assumption of it being acceptable is based on my very real experience of using the above mentioned system virtually 24/7 for 4 months now. Nothing wrong with a Fermi estimate of sorts when trying to figure stuff like this out.

My last paragraph was meant to instill a bit of modesty/doubt into my post.

Either way, you're nitpicking again. But that's just my opinion.

 

[nenforcer]

More people on these forums have more memory than they ever actually need / use.

The system in my SIG only supports up to 1.5GB RAM with 3 x 512MB DIMMS and if you want dual channel memory you are limited to 1GB (2 X 512MB or 1 x 512MB and 2 x 256MB).

This is still enough to run Windows 7 32-bit and Windows 8 32-bit albeit with lame peformance due to the single core CPU and old IDE hard disk drives.

My main machine still has only 4GB memory running Windows 7 (soon to be 8GB) while all of my relatives are running Windows 7 64-bit with only 2GB RAM and it flies.

 

[Turbonium]

Windows 7 is a bit faster than Vista at the same spec, right? The reason I ask is I used 32-bit Vista for years on 2GB. It was sorta slow at times, but generally fast enough (I wouldn't use the term "it flies" though). So yea, maybe 2GB would have been enough for Windows 7 32-bit, I don't know for sure.

Anyone running 32-bit Win7 on a 2.4GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM? If so, how is it?

 

[Homeles]

Might not be bad with a modern hard drive or SSD.

 

[fuzzymath10]

Maybe if it was a 3.0c or faster it could browse the Internet 2.0 but going from 1.8 to 2.4 cuts times by only 25%. So I'd say no because I was neither disk nor memory constrained and the cpu simply spent too much time stuck at 100%.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Windows 7 is a bit faster than Vista at the same spec, right? The reason I ask is I used 32-bit Vista for years on 2GB. It was sorta slow at times, but generally fast enough (I wouldn't use the term "it flies" though). So yea, maybe 2GB would have been enough for Windows 7 32-bit, I don't know for sure.

Anyone running 32-bit Win7 on a 2.4GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM? If so, how is it?

I ran Vista 32-bit for years on a E4300 C2D with 2GB ram and well, it did fly actually. So I blame the cpu in your case, not the amount of ram. And likely a slow storage system as well.

As for OP's thinking, some people who do very ram intensive stuff might be affected. But for the vast majority of people pc's have had more ram than they can possibly use for a long time now. I mean back in the Pentium I days I would actually sometimes get a dialog saying I needed to close some programs because I ran out of ram. Haven't seen that in a decade now.

I don't really agree about webbrowsing using a lot of ram too, but maybe I don't visit the right sites (10 Anandtech tabs open = 1.6 of 7.7 GB used)

 

[Homeles]

Some people browse with over a hundred tabs open.

 

[Idontcare]

You really have to start getting into HPC type apps before you run into ram limitations on today's modern consumer platforms.

Both my Intel and AMD rigs support 32GB (which I have and use). Now 32GB gives you 4GB/thread for a 3770K or FX8350. I happen to have an app that uses right at that level of ram. But it isn't a common app by any means.

When folks start saying 32GB isn't enough (or even 16GB for that matter), you look at what they are doing to use up all that ram and it really is the case that they are using their consumer desktops as cheap HPC workstations (myself included).

Laptops are another matter as they typically only have 2 dimm slots, so shoehorning 16GB into a laptop is a spendy proposition, but that too will be mitigated in another 2yrs.

At this point the need for more ram is really going to be driven by the growth rate in supported threads/socket. If mainstream cpus go to 16 threads/socket then ram will likely need to double up again.

 

[coffeejunkee]

Some people browse with over a hundred tabs open.

Yes, you can always do something silly:

- I want to download the internet > storage bottleneck
- I want to play every game on 6 monitors at min 120fps > gpu bottleneck
- I want to do a SuperPi 1M run under 1 sec > cpu bottleneck
- I want to run Ivy at 5.5GHz > cooling bottleneck

 

[Homeles]

Yes, you can always do something silly:

- I want to download the internet > storage bottleneck
- I want to play every game on 6 monitors at min 120fps > gpu bottleneck
- I want to do a SuperPi 1M run under 1 sec > cpu bottleneck
- I want to run Ivy at 5.5GHz > cooling bottleneck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)

 

[coffeejunkee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic)

Ooh, logic

So you don't think:
- I want to browse with over a hundred tabs open > ram bottleneck
fits in?

 

[Homeles]

No, it doesn't fit in. It isn't something silly, therefore it doesn't fit under your list of "silly things."

 

[pantsaregood]

In 2000-2005, RAM was a much bigger issue than anything else.

At this point, the only thing preventing computers from 2001 from running Windows Vista/7/8 smoothly is the existence of Adobe products. A Pentium III Tualatin should have no issue with any of those operating systems, but Flash Player and Adobe Reader will choke it. Motherboards from that period that support 1 GB or more of RAM aren't that rare, really.

 

[Revolution 11]

I agree with Homeles, browsing with 100 tabs is not silly. And more RAM is always appreciated when you have many tabs open.

I get to 100 tabs quite often, large amounts of tabs preserves up to 2 weeks of browsing activity, bookmarking into a single folder is much easier, etc, etc. Best record yet is 271 tabs.