hardware How is external ram possible?

[the1jones]

How is external ram possible?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

What do you mean?

You can use readyboost, which is using a USB as ram

Or theres like a n64 expantion pack style thing which is proprietary

[Chris Pratt]

As far as I'm aware, it's not. RAM transfer speeds are (and need to be) orders of magnitude faster than any external interface is capable of achieving. Even the 40Gbps theoretical of Thunderbolt/USB4 is not fast enough.

[artuc]

On 10/2/2021 at 11:02 AM, comander said:

This is not something you'd expect to matter for consumers any time soon. This includes me. 

Bro, lend me your 128GB USB5 RAM ?

[whispous]

Latency is also important, which is not ideal when extended along a cable.

[Eigenvektor]

On 10/2/2021 at 1:00 AM, the1jones said:

How is external ram possible?

Depends on your definition of RAM, or rather your requirements for it.

 

Technically a HDD is random access memory. It can store data ("memory") and you can read/write that data at random. However it is much too slow for many applications and the seek time (latency) before you can read data is also fairly high. An SSD improves upon this a fair bit, because it has both higher transfer speeds and lower latency. Both are still slower than e.g. DDR4 memory modules. These memory modules is what we usually refer to and use as RAM.

 

You'll immediately notice this when your computer starts to swap. Swapping extends the PCs memory capacity by treating the HDD/SSD as additional RAM. ReadyBoost goes in a similar direction by using a USB stick as a cache. It is typically faster to seek/read from a stick than to do the same with a HDD. However it becomes much less useful the more memory capacity you have and the faster your primary storage (SSD) is.

 

External RAM simply means you use something attached to your PC as additional storage space for data your CPU needs at runtime. So long as you don't have particular requirements for speed and latency, even a swap file on e.g. Google Drive could technically be used as RAM.

[artuc]

On 10/3/2021 at 6:42 PM, comander said:

It also doesn't make sense to use CXL for low end systems with only 128GB RAM. The idea is to consolidate several terabytes of memory and to dynamically allocate it. 

It was more of a tongue in cheek comment to you saying there is no consumer need, that if there was some say hypothetical future USB standard where an external RAM module is a thing it's something people would constantly be trying to bum off you.

[XGoodGuyFitz]

I did not even know that this was a thing but I'm sure its possible because people are super super smart. 

[Mark Kaine]

yeah this is surely possible already, just not implemented well, and also if you're into the whole "latency thing" this will severely bring your "kd" down lol...

 

On 10/2/2021 at 1:05 AM, HelpfulTechWizard said:

readyboost

I wanted to try that just for fun but windows won't let me, not even on slow ass laptop "your system is too fast to use this feature"... :sadpikachuface:

 

3 hours ago, comander said:

to improve how windows handles page file. 

Surely you jest.

 

On 10/2/2021 at 5:02 AM, comander said:

This is not something you'd expect to matter for consumers any time soon. This includes me. 

I never understood why pcs don't go the same route as consoles, unified memory pool... but easily expandable... i don't really buy the whole latency stuff , yes I get that its important for performance maximum,  but I doubt it's *that* important or that it can't be overcome with a bunch of "faster lanes",  rather believe that tech moves at glaciers pace and everyone is happy with status quo,  milking consumers with new underwhelming "updates" yearly...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vishera]

You can use your drive as RAM (kinda) with a page file.

But any time i use that my PC freezes or is extremely laggy and completely unusable.