Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
84 points by blfr 3 days ago | 6 comments
bellowsgulch 2 hours ago
This would have also still been true even roughly a decade later, during which time the industry was going through a transition from 32-bit computing to 64-bit, and large amounts of RAM read from BIOS in pre-UEFI systems were slower to boot the more memory you had!
replyImagine young would-become engineers at the time finding that adding that second stick to their laptop did in fact, not make their systems magically faster.
HerbManic 3 hours ago
It is funny to see how these older machines perform at their higher end limits. I'm guessing the idea on this was that if you needed that much RAM, the sacrifice of L2 cache was a worth while trade off.
replyIt was only a few weeks ago that I found out the original BeBOX computers would switch off L2 cache when running in dual CPU mode. It was just a limitation of the memory controller. Again, the thinking of, if you need the extra compute over memory bus it would be a worth while trade off.
hypercube33 2 hours ago
Honestly asking though is it worth that trade off? I enjoy watching people benchmark older Intel x86 based chips and without cache they are frankly awful slow. I'm not sure two without cache beat one with. The BeBox did run a totally different processor though so I have zero domain knowledge for that which is why I'm genuinely curious.
replyhsbauauvhabzb 4 hours ago
Many modern apps seem to cache based on total ram installed, and don’t seem to scale well to larger than normal systems. Chrome, I’m looking at you.
replyMrBuddyCasino 4 hours ago
My 1997 mainboard had extensible tag-ram, if I remember correctly. Perhaps this is the issue?
reply
There was a kernel patch for this chipset back then, which treated all memory above the lower 64MB as a RAM disk, which could then be used as swap space.
This prioritized the faster portion of RAM while still having very fast swapping.