A post about technology on the technology community?
What year is this?
Ah. It’s… Six times faster than my sdd that was already fast. This runs faster than some ram. God damn.
Which is the ultimate goal I think, if your main storage is already as fast as RAM then you just don’t need RAM anymore and also can’t run out of memory in most cases since the whole program is functionally already loaded.
So no need for RAM when?
You want RAM because you don’t want to have your computer store and constantly read/write to through TBs of temporary/useless data constantly. You need a form of cache for even faster read/write times.
Gigabytes of L3 cache when
Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)
15 GB/s is about on par with DDR3-1866. High-end DDR5 caa do well over triple that.
And that’s not to mention the latency, which is the real point of RAM.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.
For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).
Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.
As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.
I’m sure there are data science/center people that can appreciate this. For me all I’m thinking is how hot it runs and how much I wish soon 20TB SSDs would be priced like HDDs
nah datacenters care more about capacity or iops, throughput is meaningless, since you’ll always be bottlenecked by network