Samsung Memory Breakthrough Will Give Us 32GB RAM Sticks

[kestra]

http://i.gizmodo.com/5142623/samsung...2gb-ram-sticks

Yowzers!! As someone mentioned in the comment space below, is so much memory necessary? Do RAM sticks generate much heat?

[Thasifrew]

a) Most likely it would result in an 8 or 16Gb DIMM.

b) RAM isn't really that hot. Cooling options exist but usually only competitive overclockers use 'em, as the performance gain is marginal on most machines (even gaming rigs)

c) Yes, we need more RAM. Next you'll be saying that we don't need triple SLI videocards or watercooled cases for Threshing. Shame!

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by kestra
Yowzers!! As someone mentioned in the comment space below, is so much memory necessary? Do RAM sticks generate much heat?

Nah. 640KB ought to be enough for anyone!

Whenever you push electricity through something, you'll generate heat. The way computers are going (and the way they have gone for the past decade or two), RAM is heavily utilized. For anything other than incredibly simple tests, you're going to be spinning a tight loop that uses memory; if the user feels the computer is acting slowly, then probably there's several billion memory reads/writes occuring a second. That's a fair amount of electricity, and even if it's built really efficiently (and of course, memory stick designers are forever trying to make their chips more power efficient), that IS going to generate a goodly amount of heat. That's why you can actually get RAM coolers - devices that you place over a pair (usually) of memory sticks that have heat sinks and fans. They're not usually necessary, but if you're worried about heat, it's something you can do.

Thanks to the difference between virtual memory and physical memory (which was first really put to use with the early Pentiums, although theoretically you could do that sort of thing on a 386, even a 286 I think), a modern computer can use as much or as little physical memory as you give it; but the less it has, the more it has to juggle. At the moment, 32GB is way more than most people need; also, a 32-bit version of Windows can't use more than 4GB, so you need to go to a 64-bit to use it at all. But if you're doing RAM-intensive tasks like video editing, then you might well be able to put this much to use.

Of course, it's entirely possible that your _software_ can't handle more than 4GB of memory at a time, in which case you'd need to get a version that can. But that's just part of the regular progression of development. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this becomes, if not prevalent, then certainly a known phenomenon, fairly quickly.