[Infa]

Originally Posted by dkatz42

My first hard drive was 10MB and it was $1000, but that was 25 years ago. I like to point out that the 2GB of RAM in my laptop would cost $250M in 1974 dollars if I bought it back when I touched my first RAM chips.

Things do get cheaper and smaller and faster (though we're starting to run into problems because individual atoms are too big.) But even if we were able to keep up with the rate we've done in the past, which is questionable, three orders of magnitude is a *lot* of improvement to cover. It will certainly take longer than the useful life of any hardware or software being delivered in the near future, so the utility of a 16TB address space in the next o/s is worth exactly nothing, but it sounds nice. It's a marketing number that comes from the width of the address bus. What it really means is that memory address space ceases to be an issue, which *is* a good thing for people who really need tens of GB (of which there aren't many right now.)

You didn't say it would make it faster, but as processing speed is the bottleneck in track counts and DSP, faster is what you need.

RAM is very important until you have enough, and then it's just expensive Malaysian sand. Audio is not particularly demanding on RAM, except when it's used as a last-ditch resource (like loading samples into RAM because mass storage is too slow to seek, a problem that is going away in the near future.)

There seems to be a belief around here that throwing more RAM at your machine will magically improve its performance, but even with today's machines (and memory prices) you can already put in more RAM than you can use, and many people seem to do so. (I'd like to see just how much RAM in the 10GB machines I see people using actually ever sees anything other than zeroes.)

A truism of computer engineering is that RAM and CPU speeds generally need to grow together, as too much of one accomplishes little without the other. One of today's machines with 16TB of memory, even if it were feasible, couldn't do anything better than a machine with 16GB of memory (and even the 16GB box is of dubious utility.)

Yea, I see. And agree. Makes sense too.