Hi,
I was browsing an online computer parts retailer and something started bothering me. It seems most consumer technology is progressing as I would expect. CPUs are getting faster and better, hard drives are doubling almost every year, graphics cards are getting much more powerful. Display devices and batteries stagnate as usual due to the complexity of the technology involved. Same as it was five years ago, except for one small little detail. System RAM seems to be both technologically and economically stagnating.
Now, I can’t really find any statistics to back this up, but I remember upgrading my PC about three years ago (couldn’t give you an exact date) and I bought a $120 graphics card (a Geforce Ti4200 128MB), a $120 hard drive (80GB), $80 CPU (~ 1.4Ghz AMD), 1GB (2x 512MB) of DDR 333 RAM for $90 + s/h. A modest upgrade, middle of the line.
Right now for the same money I can get a graphics card that is an order of magnitude faster, a 400GB hard drive, a CPU at least twice if not three times as fast, and… 1GB of DDR2 667 RAM. Sure, the RAM has doubled in speed, but that is not in line with how the RAM market behaved before.
Now, I work in the IC industry, I’m an embedded software engineer, I can come up with a few theories of my own, but none of them are satisfactory.
a) It’s the market. PC makers and people are not interested in larger amounts of RAM vs. the speed because of the perception that it is not needed. Well I need it - at work I use pretty much 1GB of physical ram and still sometimes spill over into the page file. At home I feel entirely limited by my 1GB system. Of course I’m a power user, but I feel I could easily make good use of 16GB of ram were it available. High resolution video is here, and even when editing home movies there’s really no amount of RAM that is ever enough or too much. I can’t even find 2GB sticks for less than $500.
b) It’s a temporary plateau due to the 32-bit -> 64-bit transition. IA32 PCs can’t address more than 4GB of virtual memory in the purest sense and the way operating systems have classically been built in the past there was a limitation to 2GB of physical memory (due to address space partitioning). As far as I can tell latest version of Linux and Windows addressed this issue (no pun intended) and can handle 4GB in the least case and more with Physical Address Extension, up to 64GB in fact. Is this still an issue?
c) There is a transistor density problem that I am not aware of. Making faster RAM perhaps turned out to be a path of much less resistance than making larger/denser RAM. DRAM uses a few transistors per bit and there is a lot of bits in 2GB of RAM. Getting past this point might be creating some sort of a design issue with crosstalk on rows, or something like that. Yet, from the point of view from inside the IC industry (we don’t make general purpose RAM though) it still seems that DRAM is just a very very expensive part of consumer electronics as compared to other chips. Sure, other chips have orders of magnitude less silicon but they’re also insanely more complicated overall - feels like it would balance out.
d) RAMBUS! I don’t really know/remember the details but any time I complained about anything RAM related about 4 years ago all my friends from the IT industry would reply with “Blame Rambus”. Are they hoarding patents or something?
e) I’m wrong and I simply got an insanely good deal on RAM three years ago and it has been increasing in capacity/speed at the expected rates.
So what do you think? Which one or which combinations of what?