alt Hacker NewsCrazy to think that my first personal computer's entire storage (was 160MB IIRC?) could fit into the L3 of a single consumer CPU!
It's probably not possible architecturally, but it would be amusing to see an entire early 90's OS running entirely in the CPU's cache.
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In my case it began with 16K (yes, 161024 bytes) and 90K (yes, 901024 bytes) 5.25" floppy disks (although the floppies were a few months after the computer). Eventually upgraded to 48K RAM and 180K double density floppy disks. The computer: Atari 800.
My first PC had a 20MB HDD with 512Kb of RAM. So yeah that could fit into cache 10 times now.
You had ~160,000 times more storage than I did for my first personal computer.
KolibriOS would fit in there, even with the data in memory. You cannot load it into the cache directly, but when the cache capacity is larger than all the data you read there should be no cache eviction and the OS and all data should end up in the cache more or less entirely. In other words it should be really, really fast, which KolibriOS already is to begin with.
Maybe in 50 years the cache of CPUs and GPUs will be 1TB. Enough to run multiple LLMs (a model entirely run for each task). Having robots like in the movies would need LLMs much much faster than what we see today.
IIRC some relatively strange CPUs could run with unbacked cache.
I wonder how much faster dos would boot, especially with floppy seek times...
https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/blob/main/src/soc/intel...