News Intel Announces Optane DIMMs for Workstations, up to 512GB of memory capacity per ram stick

Valantar

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 20, 2018
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I'm already picturing myself being able to open/work on large point clouds (in the near future) on a mini itx motherboard ?

Intel Announces Optane DIMMs for Workstations, SSD 665P With 96-Layer QLC, Roadmap
Heck, with that you could run a PC entirely without any traditional storage - as long as Windows would recognize it as bootable, that is. 1TB of unified non-volatile RAM as the only system drive? I wouldn't mind that, no. Too bad we'll probably have to wait a decade if not more for consumer operating systems to support a system architecture like that.
 

Windfall

Shrink Ray Wielder
SFFn Staff
Nov 14, 2017
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Heck, with that you could run a PC entirely without any traditional storage - as long as Windows would recognize it as bootable, that is. 1TB of unified non-volatile RAM as the only system drive? I wouldn't mind that, no. Too bad we'll probably have to wait a decade if not more for consumer operating systems to support a system architecture like that.

It should be possible. Didn't ASUS have some "RAMDisk" thing that loaded the OS onto the RAM at startup for better performance?

 

Valantar

Shrink Ray Wielder
Jan 20, 2018
2,201
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It should be possible. Didn't ASUS have some "RAMDisk" thing that loaded the OS onto the RAM at startup for better performance?

RAMdisks are definitely not ASUS' invention, they've been around for a couple of decades at least. But they are pure software solutions and don't work (or even the exist) before the OS boots. Until the OS boots, the ramdisk software starts, and any files needed are copied over to it, the RAMdisk is just ordinary RAM, with no data on it. Even with nonvolatile RAM the BIOS wouldn't recognize it as a bootable volume, and Windows is designed around separate RAM and storage, meaning that a unified architecture would need significant low-level changes to the system architecture.
 

Windfall

Shrink Ray Wielder
SFFn Staff
Nov 14, 2017
2,117
1,582
RAMdisks are definitely not ASUS' invention, they've been around for a couple of decades at least. But they are pure software solutions and don't work (or even the exist) before the OS boots. Until the OS boots, the ramdisk software starts, and any files needed are copied over to it, the RAMdisk is just ordinary RAM, with no data on it. Even with nonvolatile RAM the BIOS wouldn't recognize it as a bootable volume, and Windows is designed around separate RAM and storage, meaning that a unified architecture would need significant low-level changes to the system architecture.

I understand that, this was just the closest thing I could remember. But yeah, definitely not storage on ram just yet.
 
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grant

Cable Smoosher
Jan 21, 2019
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How cute. Linus is so young he doesn't know that putting ram on expansion cards was available even back in the olden days.
 

GuilleAcoustic

Chief Procrastination Officer
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Jun 29, 2015
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How cute. Linus is so young he doesn't know that putting ram on expansion cards was available even back in the olden days.

Even sound card had RAM slots back in the days for midi synthesizer purpose (like the Sound Blaster AWE32 pictured below)