alt Hacker News> Hard to make a better wheel.
Pet peeve: stupid analogy seeing how wheels kept being improved throughout the millennia with every new technology. The only thing in common is that it's round.
Similarly, DRAM in any way you see it has been improving to the point of barely being recognizable since the 70s.
That said, DIMMs and the whole bus idea is in dire need of getting a new type of bearing.
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> That said, DIMMs and the whole bus idea is in dire need of getting a new type of bearing.
IBM has been using their own memory bus technology for both their POWER and Z machines. IIRC, it’s somewhat reminiscent of CXL, trading latency for bandwidth and size.
Seems like a pretty good analogy as you admit there have been advancements while the basic structure has remained the same. Not sure why you have a pet peeve when it is highly analogous.
The ultimate shape of DRAM is the same, the main thing that's changed is the materials and techniques to produce it. Making it very impressive, but none the less completely recognizable by someone who was familiar with DRAM in the 70s.
The wheel is the same. Pluck someone from 1000 years ago and they'll be able to correctly identify a modern wheel even though they've never seen any of the composites that go into it. The function of the wheel is identical to how they used it.
The latency of a DRAM cell has barely budged since the 1990s.