meh needs special hardware
Too bad, this isn’t happening as a kernel patch. Adding to that point:
The key detail is that CRAM is a hardware implementation of compression, meaning the logic is in the memory controller rather than in software, so it’s not a pure software trick like ZRAM. However, it uses standard off-the-shelf DRAM and a normal memory bus, so no exotic modules or custom interfaces are required.
Ah, the old download more RAM trick. An oldie but a goodie.
Neat
CRAM is an utterly goated name
Aaaeh ya know, just use some lube or wd40 and cram it in there.
This idea comes out of the woodwork ever time RAM gets expensive.
I feel like ZRAM showed up when prices were historically low
Pshaw! Who needs zram when you could use RAM Doubler™?
I can carry nearly 80 gigs of data in my head. One sixty if l use a doubler.
Finally! I can download more RAM!
Could already do that with zram!
With great speed comes great accuracy and endurance?
Ram compression called CRAM? I’m sold
The person who came up with this acronym is probably proud of their work lol
Now the fun part. What would Microsoft name it?
Copilot
Microsoft MemoryOne X Expansion Framework Subsystem. And it would require 64GB of RAM to do the compression, thus defeating the purpose of it existing in the first place, would break whenever the Edge browser updates for no discernible reason, and would about once a year cause your Documents folder to disappear.
CRAP
( C )opilot ( R )AM ( A )utomated ( P )owerup
MSCrap
How dare you! Microsoft would never publish software that utilizes system resources so well.
I 'member when microsoft ripped off stacker and called it drivespace.
As I recall they bought themselves out of it for a measly $100k and renamed it doublespace.
cram it all in there!
deleted by creator
Desperately looks for a cranberry pun…
So there are some benefits to the ram crisis? People actually optimize things because of limited resources.
When I was in computer science in college back in the 1900s, they told us that the USSR was responsible for some of the best algorithms still in use at the time (both for RAM and CPU usage) because they just had less to work with.
Guess we’re all in that boat now.
This is still just a bandaid over running 10 copies of chromium for each electron app.
You know it’s getting weird out there when Meta seems to be doing something that’s actually useful.
they ain’t doing it for us, they’re doing it for themselves.
They’ve been doing useful engineering things since the start, it’s just that it pales in comparison to all the bad things
They only did a few useful things to be more efficient in doing the bad things
Whenever big tech companies like Meta do useful things like support Overture Maps Foundation (which is also supported by Microsoft and Amazon) they are doing it to blunt some competitive advantage another tech company has, such as google in this case. They support open source insofar as they can’t monetize whatever they are open sourcing.
The Zukkk is that petty of a “real human bean”
Small performance improvements translate into large savings when you got millions of servers.
ZSTD and BYRFS, among many other smaller things, hello?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
This is very true, cheap RAM and storage just lead to inefficient, bloated code.
That certainly seems to be a genre of article right now.
Cloudflare frees up 100TB of RAM by shrinking 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache entries
MSI promises an EXPO ULL-like boost for your existing DDR5 memory
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
Microsoft vows to make Windows 11 fly on 8GB RAM amid memory shortage
I feel like they might want to start with something a little simpler, like landing the first humans on Jupiter or making Windows 11 fly on 1024GB RAM.
Does it count as optimization? For supported hardware, it’s certainly cool. But it’s not making inefficient software better, it’s making better use of the hardware.
Sounds like optimisation.
So using the back of a knife to cut something is not more efficient than using the sharp side? I would say making better use of hardware is also an efficiency gain. You use the same hardware to do more, while not driving up cost significantly. That is efficiency in my book.
It’s not using the same hardware, this seems to use a special compression chip.
To me this feels more like the benefits of a CPU or GPU upgrade. Things run faster, but not due to software improvements. When people talk about things getting optimized due to the high RAM prices, I think most people are referring to software improvements.
There is no mention of any extra hardware here though. The article even suggests this to benefit existing hardware like the steam deck.
In another comment, I posted a link to the CRAM presentation that mentioned a chip.
This article also mentions some hardware:
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression.
I don’t think it would say that if they meant the CPU was doing the compression.
Ah I see. It might not be a requirement though. In the case that the numbers are given with hardware offloaded compression it might just be slower when running on CPU. But I guess time will tell.
Aww yeah! Time to CRAM some memory!
Compressed RAM
Compressed CRAM
Compressed CCRAM
Wait I think I’ve already been here
I remember this trash:
Why does it look like a heatmap of someone stroking their giant dick?
this one was one of the bullshit ones. iirc, underneath it just made your swap bigger
Time is a flat circle
And I was remembering Drivespace and Stacker.
Ya, but those worked. Wasn’t it originally called Disk Doubler (think it might have changed names when MS purchased it).
I remember finding a bug in it that took forever to figure out. You had to install windows 3.1 before enabling it or it would fail to read one of the floppies.
Took me a LONG time to figure that one out…
Title is a bit misleading, and I think intentionally, which kinda irks me. It isn’t a 400x speedup of RAM by means of compression. If I understood correctly, it’s 400x speedup compared to disk read for swap.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’d love some positive news from the IT world that isn’t depressive. (edit: I implied this wasn’t. It is. I’m just not sure of the actual impact)
It’s a little better than your read. The ~400x speedup is in comparison to using ZRAM, which, in very brief terms, compresses memory by creating an in-memory compressed block device and assigning that as your swap space. So your “swap” is actually a compressed chunk of RAM, not on disk.
This was significantly slower than normal memory access because page faulting when looking up something in memory then fetching from swap was, itself, expensive. Regardless of how fast that swap was. When your swap is on a storage device that overhead is comparatively tiny, but when it’s just another chunk of memory suddenly it’s what you’re spending most of your time on.
Fuck yea, RAM swap? I bought both my laptop and desktop when RAM was cheap, and got more memory than I needed. I can safely allocate like 12GB to CRAM!
The win from CRAM is that it is not swap, and operates using mostly normal RAM semantics. If it works as advertised you should be able to allocate most (all?!) of your RAM as CRAM.
I would guess this is only useful in servers, as for day to day use you ideally want the lowest latency you can for responsiveness. That said, if there’s a way you can specify which type processes can use, that may be useful in some cases
Honestly though CPU processing is going to add almost no latency at all.
Almost all latency is sending to the RAM itself, so if you can compress it in a CPU cache before sending it, its nearly free RAM space.
Also systems are fucked fast these days you could probably make something responsive in pure python - other than millisecond timing scenarios like medical and audio stuff
Depends on the workload. This probably would not be great for gaming or audio production, but it might be for video editing and local LLMs
And for gluttonous browsers and browser-based apps
I’m not sure if this is misleading at all. If anything, they should have mentioned compared to ZRAM. Title is incomplete, but I don’t think it is intentionally misleading here. It just looks like they expect the reader to know CRAM is a replacement for ZRAM. The new compression method CRAM with over 400x speedup is compared to ZRAM method:
A new compression model, called CRAM, offers a different path to compression that avoids swap entirely by keeping the compressed data in memory, and it offers up to 452x the performance of ZRAM.
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression. As a result, CRAM “runs at DRAM speed,” as the creator says in the slide above. While the graph already looks impressive, it’s a logarithmic scale; CRAM, in the worst case, is doing 489 million operations per second versus ZRAM’s 1.1 million. It’s barely comparable.
Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That’s a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic.
Is writes enabled CRAM / ZRAM common? If so, then the post title is definitely misleading.
Yeah wait how would you have read only RAM?
Loaded on boot for the OS I suppose?
Probably nice for running TV boxes off even less RAM than they’re already starved for lmao
Guess read only RAM becomes… ROM? :D I have no clue either. Maybe there are protected areas in the memory no program has write access to, so it is read only from perspective of the application. Searching the web doesn’t help, because every link I clicked just explains the difference between ROM and RAM.
Hmm… when I think about Rust programming (which is true in C too probably), there are two types of locations our variables can assigned to: Stack and Heap. In example if you have a text string as a literal like “Version 1.0”, that string is located in the Stack memory, because it is unchanging. The Heap gets all those content that can vary and arbitrary long, but its slower. So the Stack content is much smaller, faster and basically read only RAM area (if I understand this correctly). Maybe that is it?
I’m drawing on some old memories here, so I could be mistaken, but I don’t think the stack is read only, not in C anyway or in the underlying machine code. If it is faster it has to do with greater overhead needed managing the larger heap and perhaps being more efficient to push and pop with small offsets to a local stack frame vs large absolute addresses.
but I don’t think the stack is read only
I don’t mean the stack is read only (edit: yes I meant that in my previous reply, but got confused myself, I actually never thought the entire stack being read only, I was only thinking about those specific variables and literal strings, sorry for confusion), but certain variables holding values that are only used to read and not change. In example you cannot change literals, therefore they are read only values. In example if you have a program that prints “Hello Lemmy”, that string is a literal that cannot be altered, and it is found in the application itself, as part of the binary. That part maybe is marked as read only?
Let me use my Raspberry Pi 3b as a practical example of what @vithigar@lemmy.ca was explaining. I run PiHole + Unbound on the Raspberry Pi 3b, with 1GB of ram. The main killer for a little Pi 3b is reading and writing to the SD card. We want to avoid that as much as possible. Block lists get updated weekly, so that’s no big deal, but there is still a lot of traffic information that is being kept track of. The solution is to load all of that into zram. As you can imagine, on a slow and resource constrained system like a Pi 3b, any performance enhancement has a huge impact. A 452x performance increase over ZRAM on a system that mostly lives on ZRAM is massive.
I am not entirely sure about this but I imagine that this is also massive news for live operating systems like Tails and Kali Live.
Is this like Ram-Rod?
I remember an old DOS utility called Ram Doubler. Sadly it also halved the speed.
Yeah It looks like someone posted a picture of the old floppy disk.
