Comment by heisenbit
9 hours ago
We always knew the limits to Moore‘s Law are first and foremost economic. Given an industry used over decades to predictable lowering of price per compute function and thus swallowed any advance for new user functions and overhead when the limits are reached there is going to be a squeeze. AI scaled up at the time the production capacity became more inelastic.
Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also software bundles. I can see decades of possible progress hiding in plain sight behind a browser screen.
AI data centers are eating like 80% of memory.
Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand.
I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.
It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.
Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.
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That's newly fabbed memory vs. an existing stock. The stock is quite massive, so optimizing existing use and enabling it to be repurposed can be meaningful.
Not really...
If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.
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