A consumer 1TB ram system - thought exercise

porina · August 12, 2018

Saw Ian Cutress of Anandtech fame tweet about problems installing Windows onto his unspecified AMD test system, Threadripper 2 seems an obvious candidate, with 1TB of ram installed. It apparently didn't boot with 2TB. It made me think, when will 1TB of ram be mainstream?

I could blindly use two data points to look at long term scaling. My first PC in '93 had 4MB of ram. My current PC has 16GB of ram. That's about 4000x more in 25 years. Assuming a geometric scaling, that would put 1TB in around 10 years time. However, this has one major flaw. In Moore's Law style, the scaling implies around 1.5x capacity increases year on year. The thing is, I had 8GB of ram in my Sandy Bridge system. I even managed to look up when I ordered it, May 2011. Check out that pricing then... (GBP)

Spoiler

Item: Gigaybyte GA-Z68X-UD4-B3 Socket 1155 onboard 7.1 Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
Qty: 1Cost: 138.21

Item: OCZ Stealth Xstream II 600W PSU - 3x SATA 2x PCI-E
Qty: 1Cost: 47.49

Item: Fractal Design Black Pearl Define R3 Case
Qty: 1Cost: 70.82

Item: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional w/SP1 - Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English
Qty: 1Cost: 85.06

Item: Sony Optiarc AD-7260B 24x DVD±RW & DL SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black
Qty: 1Cost: 14.16

Item: Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 8MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor with FREE Operation Flashpoint Red River download voucher
Qty: 1Cost: 195.40

Item: OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SSD 2.5" SATA-III 6Gb/s Read 550MB/s Write 500MB/s 60k IOPS
Qty: 1Cost: 187.49

Item: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CAS8 1.5V Non-ECC Unbuffered
Qty: 1Cost: 69.39

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Shipping method: Next Working Day at:£12.74

Subtotal:    820.76
VAT total:     164.19
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Total:        984.95
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As an additional data point, my first 16GB build was around August 2015 when I finally replaced that SB system with Skylake. That implies a doubling after 4 years...

I think it safe to say, the growth in ram capacity isn't entirely constant. Have we reached a point where for most systems, we simply don't need more ram, hence not seeing much growth outside of specific use cases? I'd have no major problem running an 8GB system for most things even today, although 16 will help responsiveness.

Without some demand in ram usage growth, I think it unlikely for us to see a similar growth in how much is fitted. Pricing obviously also doesn't help, with still elevated price-per-capacity. Given SSDs have dropped a lot recently, I hope that ram will follow...