With DDR5 RAM prices skyrocketing, some mid-range laptops could soon ship with budget-level specs. TrendForce expects companies like Dell and Lenovo to stock more notebooks with 8GB of memory. These reasonably priced options may no longer handle intense office and gaming tasks.
Maybe this will be a boon. The entire reason the ram requirements got so high as it is is because software optimization was put on the back burner. Maybe a ram shortage where people can’t obtain the ram needed will force the big name software devs to start being more frugal with ram. (talking to you chrome… whom currently is using 2 gigs alone just trying to show a twitch stream…)
Or more realistically be used as an excuse for always online cloud based services a la office 365. “We would let you download the app, but most users don’t have the computing power so instead we’ll just make this a helpful subscription!”
Oh fucking hell…
That would still pressure the browser teams to work on memory optimizations.
Honestly, it’ll be more efficient to have memory in a datacenter in that hardware in a datacenter will see higher average capacity utilization, but it’s gonna drive up datacenter prices too.
Not sure I agree. Centralizing storage, and especially memory, creates incredible round trip costs.
I mean, efficient in terms of memory utilization, like. Obviously there are gonna be associated costs and drawbacks with having remote compute.
Just that if the world has only N GB of RAM, you can probably get more out of it on some system running a bunch of containers, where any inactive memory gets used by some other container.
As a dirty commie, I agree, but unfortunately under capitalism it is just an avenue for exploitation. Large companies are deciding what we can or cannot have access to and setting the price for it in a manner completely divorced from what they’re offering.
But imagine the latency and network bandwidth issues, there’s a reason most companies moved away from the huge central framework model to distributed computing
Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That’s honestly impressive.
Keeping it positive, nice.
In the world of AI vibe coding, I don’t think so, they will push people even more towards web apps I think
that would require the software companies to actually spend money on competent developers instead of tossing peanuts at prompt writers.