Neat
meh needs special hardware
Too bad, this isn’t happening as a kernel patch. Adding to that point:
The key detail is that CRAM is a hardware implementation of compression, meaning the logic is in the memory controller rather than in software, so it’s not a pure software trick like ZRAM. However, it uses standard off-the-shelf DRAM and a normal memory bus, so no exotic modules or custom interfaces are required.
Aaaeh ya know, just use some lube or wd40 and cram it in there.
Ah, the old download more RAM trick. An oldie but a goodie.
I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. One sixty if l use a doubler.
This idea comes out of the woodwork ever time RAM gets expensive.
I feel like ZRAM showed up when prices were historically low
Pshaw! Who needs zram when you could use RAM Doubler™?
CRAM is an utterly goated name
With great speed comes great accuracy and endurance?
Is this like Ram-Rod?
I remember an old DOS utility called Ram Doubler. Sadly it also halved the speed.
Yeah It looks like someone posted a picture of the old floppy disk.
Aww yeah! Time to CRAM some memory!
Compressed RAM
Compressed CRAM
Compressed CCRAM
But you need a CXL device which does the (de)compression in hardware between the CPU and RAM?
Wait I think I’ve already been here
I remember this trash:
Why does it look like a heatmap of someone stroking their giant dick?
this one was one of the bullshit ones. iirc, underneath it just made your swap bigger
Time is a flat circle
And I was remembering Drivespace and Stacker.
Ya, but those worked. Wasn’t it originally called Disk Doubler (think it might have changed names when MS purchased it).
I remember finding a bug in it that took forever to figure out. You had to install windows 3.1 before enabling it or it would fail to read one of the floppies.
Took me a LONG time to figure that one out…
Finally! I can download more RAM!
Could already do that with zram!
So there are some benefits to the ram crisis? People actually optimize things because of limited resources.
This is still just a bandaid over running 10 copies of chromium for each electron app.
When I was in computer science in college back in the 1900s, they told us that the USSR was responsible for some of the best algorithms still in use at the time (both for RAM and CPU usage) because they just had less to work with.
Guess we’re all in that boat now.
That certainly seems to be a genre of article right now.
Cloudflare frees up 100TB of RAM by shrinking 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache entries
MSI promises an EXPO ULL-like boost for your existing DDR5 memory
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
I feel like they might want to start with something a little simpler, like landing the first humans on Jupiter or making Windows 11 fly on 1024GB RAM.
Does it count as optimization? For supported hardware, it’s certainly cool. But it’s not making inefficient software better, it’s making better use of the hardware.
So using the back of a knife to cut something is not more efficient than using the sharp side? I would say making better use of hardware is also an efficiency gain. You use the same hardware to do more, while not driving up cost significantly. That is efficiency in my book.
It’s not using the same hardware, this seems to use a special compression chip.
To me this feels more like the benefits of a CPU or GPU upgrade. Things run faster, but not due to software improvements. When people talk about things getting optimized due to the high RAM prices, I think most people are referring to software improvements.
There is no mention of any extra hardware here though. The article even suggests this to benefit existing hardware like the steam deck.
In another comment, I posted a link to the CRAM presentation that mentioned a chip.
This article also mentions some hardware:
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression.
I don’t think it would say that if they meant the CPU was doing the compression.
Sounds like optimisation.
You know it’s getting weird out there when Meta seems to be doing something that’s actually useful.
they ain’t doing it for us, they’re doing it for themselves.
Whenever big tech companies like Meta do useful things like support Overture Maps Foundation (which is also supported by Microsoft and Amazon) they are doing it to blunt some competitive advantage another tech company has, such as google in this case. They support open source insofar as they can’t monetize whatever they are open sourcing.
ZSTD and BYRFS, among many other smaller things, hello?
They’ve been doing useful engineering things since the start, it’s just that it pales in comparison to all the bad things
They only did a few useful things to be more efficient in doing the bad things
Small performance improvements translate into large savings when you got millions of servers.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
This is very true, cheap RAM and storage just lead to inefficient, bloated code.
So, from what i’ve got from the comments; instead of doing swap shenanigans except in RAM like ZRAM (which slows it down), it just compresses content to a separate portion of RAM and points there?
