Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)

Around the turn of the millennium I had a Sony Vaio 505TX, which had the same chipset. My machine was running Linux, and I maxed it out to 128MB RAM.

There was a kernel patch for this chipset back then, which treated all memory above the lower 64MB as a RAM disk, which could then be used as swap space.

This prioritized the faster portion of RAM while still having very fast swapping.

This would have also still been true even roughly a decade later, during which time the industry was going through a transition from 32-bit computing to 64-bit, and large amounts of RAM read from BIOS in pre-UEFI systems were slower to boot the more memory you had!

Imagine young would-become engineers at the time finding that adding that second stick to their laptop did in fact, not make their systems magically faster.

It is funny to see how these older machines perform at their higher end limits. I'm guessing the idea on this was that if you needed that much RAM, the sacrifice of L2 cache was a worth while trade off.

It was only a few weeks ago that I found out the original BeBOX computers would switch off L2 cache when running in dual CPU mode. It was just a limitation of the memory controller. Again, the thinking of, if you need the extra compute over memory bus it would be a worth while trade off.

Many modern apps seem to cache based on total ram installed, and don’t seem to scale well to larger than normal systems. Chrome, I’m looking at you.

My 1997 mainboard had extensible tag-ram, if I remember correctly. Perhaps this is the issue?