this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Chrome Rocks /s (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 80 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And it wasn't just a 4KB "stick" of RAM or something, it was literally magnetic rings threaded onto wires called Magentic Core Memory. Further, 4 KB implies that it was 4096 bytes, but it was actually 2048 "words" consisting of 15-bits (+1 parity bit) [source]. 2048 words requiring 16 bits each means 32,768 magnetic rings weaved onto tiny wires. Oh, and another fun detail about magnetic core memory is that if you read a value, I.e check to see if one of those magnetic rings is set to 0 or 1, that is a destructive operation. So if you wanted to read without deleting, you have to read and then immediately rewrite.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Oh, and another fun detail about magnetic core memory is that if you read a value, I.e check to see if one of those magnetic rings is set to 0 or 1, that is a destructive operation

Yeah, this is the same thing with modern RAM. The Magnetic Core Memory is doing roughly the exact same thing modern DRAM is doing. In the MCM it's magnetic hysteresis that's holding a bit of magnetic charge, in DRAM it's a tiny capacitor holding a bit of an electric charge. Either way, the charge is placed into a thing called a sense amplifier. The amplifier is a flip-flop circuit. During the refresh cycle the state of the sense amplifier is written back to the cell whence it came.

Static RAM, SRAM, is the kind of RAM that a read is non-destructive. It's really expensive (Here's a 2MB SRAM as an example of cost) and doesn't do well at really fast clock speeds at the moment. However, SRAM is really simple to interface with (Block diagram on page 1 and you can see you just have Address pins (A0-20), IO pins (I/O0-7), and the control pins that you turn on or off to indicate what the heck you are doing with the chip (CS#, OE#, WE#). Which the OE means output enabled (read) and WE means write enabled (write). See super easy to interface with) and it's usually what's used when folks proto circuits that need RAM. It doesn't matter what your clock speed is nor how you probe the contents of the memory, all of it is non-destructive. But DRAM, is stupid cheap compared to SRAM and handles higher clocks a lot better.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a quality ass comment. Cheers to you.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's a link to a Smarter Everyday video that talks about it

Linky link

He has a number of videos on it if you want to deep dive into it. Trust me you do it's cool AF

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/dI-JW2UIAG0

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Those 4kb only held a fraction of the computation needed to fly to the moon though. All the complicated heavy stuff was done by humans and bigger computers down on earth.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Well, most of the websites now are mostly bloatsites with so much useless effects and/or scripts.. 8 gigs of ram is not a problem here, current standards or maybe let’s call them fancy e-fashions are.

Few days ago I stumbled upon a single page website that was loading like 12 fonts and I don’t remember how many effects libraries just to use some fading and one font in two weights.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I went to change privacy settings on my old yahoo email account and the tab started taking up 24GB of ram. Some sites are just mega fucked.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I accept sites looking not as imagined by the designer and even partially not working sites ... But I'd never ever disable the ad blocker, the cookie whitelist and the JavaScript whitelist.

If the site does not work at all and if I really need the content of that site I open it in a new private window. If I can find the needed information elsewhere, Ctrl+W it is!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

If each website needed the skill and effort of the Apollo guidance computer, you wouldn't need tabs because there wouldn't be many.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

FIREFOX HAS USED 32GB OF MY 64GBs! WHEN WILL THEY PUT A CAP ON MEMORY USAGE?

it got to the point that I had the OS cap it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just curious, what were you doing with Firefox to pull anywhere near that much RAM? Right now I've got a few tabs open along with Steam/Discord/Spotify/a few terminal windows/Helvum and I'm not using 3gb for the entire system according to htop. Just curious how many tabs you have open to pull 32GB from Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it's not mainly how many but how long. I leave my desktop running for weeks, and there was a while when clearing Firefox's cache was the main reason I needed to restart. I do leave something like ~100 open at a time.

htop/top are a bit tricky because Firefox spawns a bunch of sub processes, so it's frequently an undercount; I forget whether htop accounts for that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do leave something like ~100 open at a time

That's... that's too many tabs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Think of it as transitory bookmarks. It's something like 20 tabs across 5 different windows for completely different contexts: dev pages in one desktop, work google docs in another, personal email/music/etc in another, gaming in a fourth, social media in a fifth, etc. It means I can easily context switch when I need to without having to dredge the exact things I need out of my own memory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Fair enough, I never keep tabs open myself, but your madness has method.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I had the same problem - this extension saved my RAM: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well on Linux we use all the ram we have and give it free when needed

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

yeah, so hypothetically, yes, but when I'm running scripts, frequently their memory usage can cause my computer to freeze if I don't immediately have that memory available. and those are the actual reason I need 64GB, not feeding Firefox's insatiable hunger for RAM.