My next Workstation

[Dave Stevens]

Quoting Ken <kmmos1 at verizon.net>:

> On Thursday 08 July 2010 10:11:15 Billie Walsh wrote:
>
> <[snip]>
>
>> In my experience with computers memory is always going to be faster than
>> mechanical hard drives.
>
> Yes, pretty much by definition. The average access time of a rotating hard
> drive is on the order of magnitude of milliseconds, and the average access
> time of RAM is on the order of magnitude of nanoseconds. The difference is
> six orders of magnitude, or, stated another way, RAM is a million times
> faster than hard drives.
>
>> Back in the dark ages I had an old 8088 computer that I installed what was
>> called a "Rampat" board with 100meg of memory on it.
>
> Really? I don't remember those 16-bit ISA cards holding more than 16  
> MB of RAM
> on them. Were memory boards marketed to the general public in those days of
> 640 KB MS-DOS addressability capable of recognizing 100 MB of RAM? Remember,
> we're writing about rows of discrete, spidery-legged DIP chips, not today's
> snap-in memory modules.  And back then, what would a 100 MB board, if it had
> existed, have cost?
>
> <[snip]>
>
>> Something else. Never skimp on memory. Use as much as possible or until
>> your dipping into the kids college fund, whichever comes first. Best
>> investment in computer performance.
>
> Thanks for the Saturday morning laugh. Yes, RAM is the best performance
> investment for PCs, but there are a couple of considerations. One is that RAM
> prices are relative to their time. I can remember buying a new Pentium
> machine to run the then brand-new Windows 95 when RAM prices were $40 per
> megabyte, and 64 MB of EDO RAM would cut into the kid's college fund -- or
> mine, for that matter. Today's memory prices, per megabyte, are two orders of
> magnitude lower than fifteen years ago, and really are a performance bargain.
>
> (I was too young to participate, but I've heard a 1960's era IBM  
> mainframe RAM
> upgrade of 32 kilobytes was about a quarter of a million dollars.)

yes, a buck a byte was the guideline in early seventies

>
> The second consideration is a physical one. If one installs multiple  
> gigabytes
> of unused RAM, the machine

or a core or two

  still takes time to manage all of the installed
> RAM all of the time, as opposed to just accessing hard drive memory locations
> when specific locations are needed. Even though RAM is a million times faster
> than rotating platters, it still takes machine time even to manage RAM the
> operating system and applications are not using. The result may be measurable
> performance lags, not to mention power usage and heat generation, from system
> boards over-packed with RAM that is not actually needed.
>
>
> Ken
>
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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
   Krishnamurti