Re:DRAM Prices in ‘Freefall’
by dagw on Friday March 08, 2019 @07:22AM
(#19336912)
A program which is memory intensive must be slower then one which needs little memory -- just because load/write operations from the CPU take time.
Not if the alternative to reading/writing from RAM is reading writing from disk. One piece of data processing software I used to use had its roots in the early 80s and was very memory efficient. It achieved this by rewriting the input data to disk in a clever way and the reading and writing just the parts it need. I could process gigs of data using only a couple of hundred MBs of RAM. A different, more modern, program I also used would slurp in as much data as it could fit in RAM and then just go from there. It would happily use 30 of the 32 GB or RAM I had every time it ran, but it was also 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.
Not if the alternative to reading/writing from RAM is reading writing from disk. One piece of data processing software I used to use had its roots in the early 80s and was very memory efficient. It achieved this by rewriting the input data to disk in a clever way and the reading and writing just the parts it need. I could process gigs of data using only a couple of hundred MBs of RAM. A different, more modern, program I also used would slurp in as much data as it could fit in RAM and then just go from there. It would happily use 30 of the 32 GB or RAM I had every time it ran, but it was also 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.