How much RAM will you need in 5 years?

Apple and Microsoft recently bumped their minimum system requirements to 16 gigs of RAM (mostly to accommodate new AI features in Windows and macOS). How much RAM will we need to have in 5 years? Let's look at the RAM usage trajectory of personal computers to figure out what we'll need to have in the near future.
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[@summerWTFE]

We need more space for ads, telemetry, and surveillance.

[@mlpfimguy]

"Unused RAM is wasted RAM!"

[@registromalplena2514]

😂😢

[@Demopans5990]

Electron

[@J.erem.y]

@@Demopans5990 Yea that's what he said "ads, telemetry, and surveillance" also known as electron. lol

[@Nova-dx8hz]

ever wonder where all that extra super speed and bandwidth went when 5G rolled around to no difference o.0

[@nonetrix3066]

The gigabyte is the new megabyte

[@JohnCrawford1979]

And getting closer to being the new kilobyte. 😏

[@Pressbutan]

8 bit to 64 but addressing. Expotential address space = exponentially more addressable ram

[@JohnCrawford1979]

@@Pressbutan - and they're already talking about 128 bit when we haven't even come close to reaching the limits of 64 bit.

[@balsalmalberto8086]

@@JohnCrawford1979 So you're saying N64 was so far ahead into the future we just couldn't see it?

[@JohnCrawford1979]

@@balsalmalberto8086 - Yes it was. No one had the processing powers, etc. in the mid 90's to do all the texturing needed to make realistic graphics. Part of the reason after the N64, Nintendo used 32-bit cpus. Even with reaching the 4 Gb RAM threshold where 64-bit would make a difference, 32-bit was hardly to the limits of its capabilities, and many 32-bit programs would still be adequate today if not for the push of planned obsolescence that demands everything be 64-bit, at least until they're ready to force everything to be 128-bit, possibly in 10 years, maybe even less, despite scratching the surface of 64-bit.

[@bruwyvn]

React + Electron in every "desktop" application yummmm 😋

[@rhone733]

🤮

[@KingKrouch]

That's why every idiot saying "Unused RAM is wasted RAM", and "What's the harm in another game launcher ransoming us" are just useful idiots.

[@JohnCrawford1979]

There are some computers still using yum. 😏

[@bruwyvn]

@@JohnCrawford1979 still waiting for the libdnf rewrite huh?

[@JohnCrawford1979]

@@bruwyvn - No one's gonna yank my yogurt. 😏

[@Matthew-go9rh]

I'm old enough to remember when Visual Studio not only didn't take a full minute (or more) to load a medium size project, but when it did, it even worked properly.

[@alexeysamokhin9629]

Nvme + 32gb ram = VS IS FAST

[@jimmyproton9901]

@@alexeysamokhin9629 even this is a stretch in my experience. I just tried Visual Studio on my 64GB ram machine, all top hardware and it still took a solid 20 seconds just to launch the program, forget about opening a project. Also it spat out some weird errors and crashed when I tried to just open a json file. vscode and vim had no such issues (LOL)

[@TheStephensonRocket]

128 GB Clippy, thanks for the nightmares

[@uncrunch398]

Five years later, 2TB Clippy, no difference just hungrier.

[@triffid0hunter]

This graph desperately needs a logarithmic Y scale

[@JohnMiller-mmuldoor]

Yeah, the jump from 128K ram to 4 MB looks tiny, but it’s actually a 3100% increase I think? No different than going from 128mb to 4 gigs.

[@bobowon5450]

Putting more ram into computers only enables developers to be less efficient

[@_xX_me_Xx_]

bingo

[@trailblazingfive]

I bet you watched it in 144p after first downloading it to a hard drive without anything else running in the background

[@Snufflegrunt]

And it sells computers to normies who would ask too many questions if their new system has the same oversized amount of RAM as their system from 5 years ago. But yes.

[@slaapliedje]

The problem is, that same methodology applies to the operating system itself! When you ultimately think about it, what can, for example, a modern word processor do that a word processor from 25 years ago can not do? But the ram requirements have gotten nuts.

[@Snufflegrunt]

@@slaapliedje In the case of modern MS Word, quite a lot. But MS Word is overkill for 95% of people.

[@toldultra5578]

TLDR: developers creating infinite abstractions over abstractions, using thousands of dependencies, using virtualization + containers, refusing to learn more efficient stacks for the work they're doing, never optimizing, never learning better algorithms, forcing features you'll never use; all to make their life easier and their work more productive at your cost, and if you don't like it they tell you "it's your fault for not having the newest hardware anyway". We like to pretend it doesn't matter, but it does. And yes, management requirements do have some fault in that too.

[@AsherAries]

Hear, hear!

[@mathmagician8191]

For some recent games, even having the latest hardware is not enough to compensate for the developer's lack of optimisation

[@gabrielmendes9927]

​@@mathmagician8191 Kof Kof *elden ring* kof kof

[@serversC13nc3]

so our new generation developers are incompetent and inefficient?

[@MrFujinko]

​@@serversC13nc3 No, the problem is cost. It cost too much to change it. Cheaper to have the end user upgrade.

[@circumferenc]

I blame javascript devs

[@amongussuss341]

fax

[@austinwoodall5423]

I miss flash

[@FlamingSwordful]

Yeah they really need to suck_less

[@VGl0dXM]

very valid

[@TheSolidSnakeOil]

I blame them every time I open youtube. It is the epitome of JS hell. I can wait 2 secs to fetch some data.

[@OrbitalSP2]

Joplin, a note taking app uses 1.2Gb of ram on my machine. 1.2gb for taking notes. That's insane. And if you mention that to the devs they are like "F you"

[@jungervin8765]

"1.2gb for taking notes" Lol. If just need to take notes then use notepad? That app way more complex than "just taking notes". I guess thats basically a webview ( a webbrowser) with incredible amount of features and formatting and everything..

[@OrbitalSP2]

@@jungervin8765 nor really a very good argument since there are other apps with similar features that require much less ram, like Trilium, which uses 200mb.

[@HJ-jg4ql]

This data should be displayed logarithmically.

[@raidensama1511]

I blame Electron

[@GreenStorm01]

True. Witnessed Teams eat 9GB of ram once.

[@xDJKerox]

Web technologies are the worst offenders, but don't fool yourself, everything is in a sorry state... That's why Electron ends up getting used in the first place. Cross platform development comes with such a heavy baggage that software ends up being developed web first and WE SHOULD THINK WHY. Everything is so complex when it doesn't need to be. Software needs to change, it's not acceptable that in 2024 you can't even put a pixel on a screen on multiple platforms without going through unneeded layers of complexity. Just because of Apple, if you want to support Mac you need to use MoltenVK instead of Vulkan even if you're able to work with VK. Up until Vulkan 1.2 (2020) you couldn't use the same shader language for desktop platforms. This doesn't happen only with graphics sadly...

[@magfal]

​@@xDJKeroxFlutter is brilliant for modern dev using sane amounts of system resources. I hope the other OS vendors contribute to optimizing the experience like Canonical has done.

[@u9vata]

We had a 3dsmax plugin with 4kb ON DISK size written in C++, it got an electron "app" that is one of its screens, because it was "faster this way to do". They wanted to add a completely different electron app for a different screen because.... compatibility.... imagine that: just a plugin for an already huge program had full fledged two browsers for two of its gui windows... Thank God I could unify at least the two so there is only one... Still with that the plugin became like 200 megs up from 4kb and with nearly same functionality.

[@u9vata]

@@hashtag9990 No, electron in and on itseld is already a "fából vaskarika" bad idea in itself - and why the web is like it is now is exactly a series of similar decisions to be honest.

[@kpcraftster6580]

Gen z "gamers" these days talking about 64gb as a bare minimum, when every game worth playing runs smooth on a 10+ y/o win7 laptop with 6gb. Smh.

[@brianmiller1077]

Well, they gotta have 240 fps to be competitive.

[@kpcraftster6580]

@@brianmiller1077 I'd rather have 1080px at 30Hz than 480px at 144Hz, but I'd rather have 720px at 60Hz than either. No game ever needs more than 60 fps.

[@nerzeus]

Win 11 uses almost 8gb of ram just sitting idle.

[@pluffcrock3438]

"""idle"""

[@shallex5744]

is that really so? good heavens. i know windows 10 uses 2gb, which is already horrendous. though i'm sure it also depends on how much ram is in your system

[@pavelperina7629]

@@shallex5744 If you run Linux with KDE and uninstall PIM nonsense, it needs like 1.6GB idle. 2GB are barely enough to run even openbox once you launch either firefox or chrome based browser.

[@matthewhedge8955]

@@pluffcrock3438 it’s busy sending telemetry data needs a lot of ram for that

[@progste]

@@shallex5744 2? my windows 10 sits comfortably at 4.5GB when it's doing nothing...

[@_TeaMaster]

Maybe it's just an age thing, but I have a completely opposite opinion here. It seems wild to me, we are still seriously talking about 16 or even 32 GB of ram on a personal working machine. 64 should be a bare minimum, as it's not about "how much RAM do I need?" but about "how much RAM can I use?". The answer is - all of it. If I have more resources, I would find more ways to utilize them to make myself more productive. I don't need to have 3 different Linux distros, and a Windows running in a distrobox container at the same time, but If I can they are pretty useful to separate home/work/gaming systems. I don't need to have multiple workspaces with dozens of Firefox instances opened on them, but if I can, it would be useful. I don't need to have several personal ML models running on my machine at the same time, but if I have an option, I would find a way to use it to my advantage.

[@GreenStorm01]

Yes. This. All of it.

[@treelineresearch3387]

Yeah I can't complain that RAM is cheap enough to have a hard drive from 10 years ago worth of it hanging off your CPU. I bought 64GB of DDR4-ECC for less than $80 the other day.

[@BrianCroweAcolyte]

I installed 64GB of RAM in my friend's laptop for him and it blew his mind. He didn't expect it to do anything, but never needing to hit the pagefile and Windows just caching everything really keeps the system responsive. RAM is so cheap now that it's incredible, I remember paying around $100 for 8GB of DDR3 back in the day. These days you can get 32GB of DDR5 for $100, sometimes less, and that's even with the massive amount of inflation we've had since the 2000s.

[@luizdevil6855]

if you have to use a desktop like a mainframe that only says how bad are operating systems failing at their task

[@BrianCroweAcolyte]

@@luizdevil6855 Why shouldn't you use a desktop like a mainframe? RAM and CPU cores are both incredibly cheap now compared to 10-15 years ago. Running multiple virtual machines and having 200 tabs open is nothing when you can get 64GB of RAM for under $200 and Intel is selling 14 core CPUs for under $300.

[@solidandshade]

16mb for win3.1? Lunduke you gotta be young. I used to run 3.1 just fine with 1mb ram on my 80286 machine while 384kb of that 1mb was reserved as graphics memory. 16mb was over the top even for win95/98.

[@pilotamurorei]

yeah win 95/98 ran at like 4mb smoothly iirc (been awhile since i touched a win98 pc). Hell i think the first pc i got after i moved to japan, a Dell running XP was only like 1gb of ram

[@Snufflegrunt]

9x needed 8mb to really be usable. 4mb was the listed minimum but even MS internally admitted that was borderline.

[@Kwijibob]

Nah I ran Win 3.1 on a 386SX with 8MB of RAM and it made a huge difference going to 16MB. Similar to going from 8GB to 16GB today.

[@bendono]

I specifically remember purchasing a new 386 PC a few months prior to the release of Windows 3.0. 1 MB of memory was sufficient to run the upcoming Windows 3.0, but I splurged and upgraded to 2 MB.

[@magnum333]

@@pilotamurorei no way... for 9x you needed 8mb

[@xDJKerox]

The thing is, programming is fucked up right now. Like Jonathan Blow says, everything is more complicated for no sensible gain. You can't even put a pixel on the screen without going through N layers of cruft... Hardware has evolved a lot, but software did in fact degraded and we're not doing enough to stop it.

[@rhone733]

Yep. Crappy developers don't know how to write clean, efficient code.

[@xDJKerox]

@@rhone733 It's not the developers fault to be honest, its all the ecosystem... This means, mostly companies, which are the ones that end up pushing technologies. But this includes Hardware manufacturers, Operating Systems, Programming Languages and everything that gets build up on top of this.

[@monkev1199]

I definitely get a feeling that a lot of programming has no engineering mindset. Code is simply a tool to reach a goal, not an ends to a mean. Really the last place where performance truly exists as a culture is embedded systems, and even that is being invaded by the per kloc programmer who writes their AbstractBuilderFactory classes.

[@xDJKerox]

@@monkev1199 Thankfully there's *some* kind of awareness about these issues, and that's why I'm interested in the subject. I started my programming journey formally around 2014, with some bumps on the road and the pandemic but I never stopped learning and doing my own stuff (mostly through a overscoped game development project so I don't have much to show for it hah) I had been aware of the issue for some time and recently I got interested in actually going lower level, but I'm not sure where should I put my efforts into. This year I toyed a bit with Rust but recently I've been considering C, Zig, and C++. On the other side I've been learning about Cyber Security too.

[@xDJKerox]

​@@monkev1199 Damn, youtube disappeared my comment. I said something along the lines of: Thankfully there's *some* awareness of the issue. I started my formal coding journey around 2014 and some stuff happened. I first saw J.B. talking about this a few years ago and I recently decided to try and go lower level. I did played and contributed to OSS with some Rust this year for about a month. And I'm currently looking where to put my efforts in, I'm considering C, Zig, C++. And also learning about CyberSecurity.

[@Papierzeit]

Yes, that's crazy, but do you know what's crazy? You can still take these old machines and write your texts on them and I think very few people do that. You don't have to buy a new machine to do something like that. I have computers here that are 40 years old and older and still work and are still an option when it comes to just writing text.

[@MegaLokopo]

Most people do more things than just writing text. Did you watch the video? I'd like to see a computer with 128 kb of ram run a youtube video at 1080p.

[@Papierzeit]

@@MegaLokopo Yes, I watched the whole video and only referred to the text section. But yes, you can do it with a trick via Raspi hardware, that you build a module for a C64 that even conjures up such a KZbin video on your CRT. And we all know that the resolution is not everything, especially with an analog device like an old CRT that I have here just like my C64s. So technically you can do it with old hardware and a module. And the whole thing is omly 64kb for display this, postprocessing with the a little help of a cheap Raspi.

[@electrifiedspam]

If you don't need 16 gigs, how can they charge more for their machines?

[@magnum333]

That, and lazy programmers

[@onkelfabs6408]

Nowadays you cannot even work with 16GB of RAM on Windows 11 any more.

[@jungervin8765]

Why people so dumb? My work machine have 8 GB RAM. it is totally fine..I used win 10 with 4 GB ram at work! 4 GB! Even with that works kinda well with an SSD.

[@onkelfabs6408]

@@jungervin8765 yeah maybe your machine is not bloated with both most of the windows bloatware and corporate bloatware.

[@tomkarho]

All of the ram. Just... all of it.

[@PSUQDPICHQIEIWC]

That's kind of the point. You need system resources for the convenience of devs who don't care about efficiency and for the benefit of companies that want to abuse those resources, not your actual necessity.

[@johnphamlore8073]

For the case of Apple, I have a sinking feeling they are doing this just to force their users to buy all new equipment. Every single iPhone except for the top end of the latest was instantly obsoleted. The base model of almost every Mac sold up to now was 8GB at most, so Apple not only has obsoleted all of their past Intel Macs, they now have taken out the base of all of their own silicon Macs sold. I think for iPhones the Apple minimum will be 8GB, but how long will that hold before they obsolete all of the 8GB models once they have higher ends ones with more memory, so that Apple can go for phones that eventually will sell for thousands of dollars.

[@jamiehav0k62]

i had 32 gigs of ram in 2014 its only just become the new optimal. Things have really slowed down. My gtx 1080 and 5820k from the same time period can still run every new game playable at 60 fps as well. Remember the days that a cutting edge pc would only last 2 years before it needed an upgrade or likely a whole new pc to keep up.

[@shaunpatrick8345]

Within the last few months, Chrome has changed its algorithm for loading the last session's tabs at startup. It's much more efficient now, so RAM usage will go back down to where it was when people used bookmarks, and then start to grow from there. I saw someone on Reddit asking how they can recover 7000 tabs that didn't get restored. Unfortunately for them, they found a way.

[@KristofferTrolle]

I just feel this jump to 16gb is not a jump that gives us something extra we are gonna need, unlike in the past. I think it's mostly gonna be used for sloppy programming and (so far) not very useful "AI" features. As example: I recently noticed my Dropbox Windows client used 750 mb ram idle. And my Adobe Lightroom / Camera Raw has exploded in ram and gpu ram usage (and requirements) after they added AI features (which I never touch). I'm a .NET developer myself and I noticed that after the Nuget package manager was introduced ram usage has exploded since ever framework now loads it's own dependencies (with sub and sub sub depedencies) almost always in different versions, often results in hundred mb of use just to run simple consoles app.

[@Netist_]

Exactly the issue. It's not the availability that's the issue. I'm HAPPY that I can easily build a machine with 64GB of RAM. That's great. What I'm not happy about is, as you said, something like dropbox using almost a gig of ram to do... nothing. Software is getting heavier and heavier, but adding nothing of value in the way of features. It's insanity.

[@LangleyNA]

@10:31 LOL! I love that _"...minimum viable operating system where you can actually do word processing"_ line. Good job, Byran Lunduke.

[@Snufflegrunt]

I remember going from 512MB to 1GB around 2004. That was crazy. So smooth. Most significant upgrade I’ve ever made, more significant than purchasing an SSD, and I’m pretty sure even today I could slim down my setup to 1GB if I really wanted/had to.

[@DigitalMoonlight]

Induced demand, demand always grows to fit the capacity of a given system. This is as true for computers as it is for public transport, highway infrastructure, etc;

[@comesignotus9888]

Years ago programmers had no issues doing their work in a simple text editor. Modern code-monkeys won't write a "Hello, world!" without an IDE which links some "very necessary" multimegabate libraries by default. Ah, and the best way to make cross-platform software nowadays is to use Electron, i.e. to include an entire browser in every piece of s.

[@xDJKerox]

We should be pushing towards better cross-platform development. It is so sad that the ecosystem is so f'd up that someone ended up "solving the issue" in this way. Web technology is horrendous to me, I've been praying for WASM to take over the web but it honestly talks about the failure of the ecosystem when it ended up being like this.

[@jungervin8765]

@@xDJKerox Web tech is amazing, it is just a skill issue. I am using a 6 years old, slow (max 2ghz core clock), 8gb ram notebook, never had problem with complex web apps or electron apps.

[@xDJKerox]

@@jungervin8765 Please don't shill HTML and JavaScript for the love of god...

[@username7763]

Yeah using Electron to be cross platform is like shipping a Windows VM with your software claiming to be cross platform. Actually, I know some linux software that did that with a Linux VM. Your software is not cross platform if the platform is runs on is as big as an operating system.

[@jungervin8765]

@@username7763 Stop it. You all have no clue about tech. Please stop.

[@switzerland]

RAM hasn't been growing for way too long. We need to accelerate

[@zekmaster644]

No, we don't. If anything, software devs need to optimize their applications as much as possible so we can use them with the least amount of memory

[@user-li2yv5je5e]

Run both Chrome AND Firefox at the same time. Now there's some accelerated ram growth.

[@onkelfabs6408]

​@@user-li2yv5je5e3.5 GB of RAM gone out of the window with just that.

[@BrianCroweAcolyte]

Something I've noticed is that older people are absolutely obsessed with memory usage lol. It's pretty clear we're going to plateau somewhere between 16GB to 32GB, assuming there's not another dark horse like AI. As a gamer, 16GB has been the real minimum spec for probably a decade at this point. If you want high quality high resolution assets on everything, memory and storage usage is just going to go up. CPUs are so fast now that they can actively compress and decompress memory, storage is insanely fast now so going out to the page file doesn't hurt that bad anymore, etc.

[@justinJ689]

I would agree with you but why does everything need to be so bloated. Games are different in a sense they need to load visual assests and use a lot of memory. We can't just let these companies run with everything. They already collect a lot of our data. Things can be done differently and should be. Privacy and careful development of AI should be a priority.

[@VGHOST008]

Well, I completed Witcher 3 just fine back in 2015 on i5-3330, r9 270 with only *4Gb of RAM* (Win 7) and that was more than enough back in the day for any gaming machine. Nothing was freezing or lagging, smooth 45-50fps on high-med at 1080p. There's always gonna be 'that one game/app' that for no reason raises the bar for system requirements so I rarely ever bothered upgrading above the required minimum since you can't really even 'catch up' for too long. Installed 24Gb on my main machine, 20GB on a laptop - won't upgrade in at least 4-5 years.

[@Ben333bacc]

16 gig has NOT been the minimum spec for ten years dude. That is nuts. 16 gb is still plenty if not overkill for most people today.

[@BrianCroweAcolyte]

@@Ben333bacc Notice how I added the qualifier "as a gamer". Yeah grandma checking her email doesn't even need a computer at this point, she needs an iPad lol

[@BrianCroweAcolyte]

@@justinJ689 No company is going to release software that cant run on the majority of computers, unless it's so advanced that they quite literally just cant get it running. If hardware slows down maybe then they'll take the time to really dig into optimization to squeeze out that last ~20% or whatever, but until then it's not worth the dev time.

[@mips-m]

Things went downhill when javascript/web got pushed everywhere... In 2001, I used to browse the web, do text editing, and multitask on Windows 2000 machine with 128 MB RAM.

[@username7763]

Back then, Javascript interpreters were way slower and less efficient than they are now. So it is telling that we've gone way past the performance improvements we made to be so much worse.

[@soppaism]

And people will still be augmenting that with a 64GB swap partition 💪

[@adambester3673]

because i have 64 gigs of ram i have accidentally allowed distros im installing to automatically make 64 gig swaps.

[@cantileveredapotheosis]

Noswap masterrace right here.

[@magnum333]

It would only make sense if you hibernate

[@shallex5744]

look into zram swap, by which you store compressed swap pages in ram, compressed at approximately a 4:1 efficiency ratio. it's like downloading more ram, but real. assuming a 4:1 compression ratio, if you had, say 8 GB of ram, you could dedicate 4 GB of it to zram-based swap, which would give you 4 GB of regular memory, and effectively 16 GB of swap, giving you an effective 20 gb of ram with only 8 GB of actual ram. but unlike a partition, this swap space is only filled as it's needed, so until you start swapping, you'll have access to 8 GB of ram like normal, only using up swap ram as it gets filled

[@reecesx]

It's cute of you to assume swap under windows works like the old ways and doesn't already demand a coefficient based on the installed memory just to duplicate everything to disk. Try setting up some windows vms with small emulated disks, and try to daily drive them without issues, ill wait. youre lucky if those devenv vm images work

[@JohnCrawford1979]

We'll probably be up to 1Tb RAM minimum within 5 to 10 years.

[@jsmith8147]

Games are 100GB just upload whole thing to ram to squeeze out max speed and AI real time re texturing and renderings.

[@TheRealCaptainFreedom]

That RAM sounds like the GOAT, yo.

[@JohannesDavidsen2024]

Justine have that much on her Mac i think

[@JohannesDavidsen2024]

1.5 Tb and it was 4 years ago

[@crazybeatrice4555]

Nah, memory isn't really scaling on process nodes like it used too.

[@cantileveredapotheosis]

Im totally here for the Babylon 5 references.

[@tschak909]

Your daily reminder that building Hello World in Electron produces gigabytes of binary artifacts.

[@JamesJansson]

I've had 16GB in my main computer since 2009. I've had 16GB in all my laptops since 2018. This is not a revolutionary amount of RAM in any realm except for Apple's reality extortion field, where RAM costs 8X what it costs on any other computer.

[@Jenny_Digital]

Titanic was created on an Amiga 4000 too, and nobody’s saying their SFX are cheesy. Incidentally, I loved Babylon 5.

[@mips-m]

I think Amiga was used for camera control and quick preview of recorded shots. There is a youtube video about restored Amiga from production set.

[@TheOblomoff]

Could have put logarithmic scale on the graph. it'd show multiplications easier.

[@cmdr.shurimal8980]

This KZbin tab alone taking 545 MB of RAM by the end of the video... And sometimes I have half a dozen to-be-watched YT tabs open in the background. For a comparison: Jellyfin open in browser streaming high quality FHD video from my NAS occupies just ~170 MB.

[@cybernit3]

In the early 90s my Amiga 500 I expanded it to 2megs RAM so I have 2.5 megs ram and got a 52 Meg HD. I think the key reason more ram is needed because we are using 64bit cpus with special floating point registers XMM 128bit and AVX 512 bits (64 bytes). Another reason is because the lazy development using high level languages that require a lot of ram; bloatware. You are right Lunduke I noticed my youtube tab was 3.6 Gigs ram needed heh... So 5 years from now; I think 64 GB ram and 10 years probably 128 GB to 1TB. BTW I think a new Babylon 5 is coming out soon; use to love that show.

[@phoenixrising4995]

Windows is pretty bloated now to and their gonna bloat it some more with AI that spies on you.

[@RichardBetel]

There's a lot going here... We've been trading memory usage for IO and/or CPU for the duration of the computer industry. I remember CRC-16 lookup tables on the C64: they were coo- to-haves at 300-600 baud, but they were necessary at 2400: the 6502 just couldn't keep up with the serial line if it had to do the full regime of bit-shifts with every byte. But then Z-modem came along with the PC, and it was using CRC-32! The C64 didn't have enough ram for that lookup table. Where are we now? Harddrives are getting bigger, but they're not really getting faster. Industry moved from RAID5 to RAID6 because of it. Its not like you got away from that for free because you're on a desktop. Your computer is caching fonts, images, libraries, configs and databases. Computers take a few minutes to boot compared to the seconds that a home-computer used to. I don't remember the source, but I recall a study from the mid-90s that concluded that more the half of all computer upgrades were faster CPUs but that should have been more RAM. Most of our software these days is still single-threaded. Computers do as much as they do because they can pre-compute and cache.

[@The8bitbeard]

AI was the reason for my most recent RAM upgrade. I was doing fine with 32 GB. More than enough actually, with plenty of wiggle room. I got in to running AI language models locally though, so I upped my RAM to 64 GB so I can fit larger models in there.

[@fontende]

better get board with 256Gb support of DDR4 (it's twice cheaper than new DDR5) my 128Gb is barely enough now, new merged mixed 100+ billions models using 120Gb+ Ram

[@zorrozalai]

The Google search function installed on my android phone uses 644 MB disk space. It displays an input box. Meanwhile, I wrote a document & training registration system for manufacturing plants. It was around 10 MB.

[@xzs432]

some games i play were crashing so since i have an nvme ssd as my main drive, i made the pagefile on this drive 16GB and my games stopped crashing, they have memory leaks, seeing as my pc has 16GB of ram and some games take atleast 12GB of ram not leaving much left for the system. with what you said in the video about the minimum required ram doubling about every 5 years make me wonder for how much longer im going to be able to keep up with videogames as a hobby, being able to play what's new. i got the pc im currently using in december of 2019.

[@Destroyer954]

i was using 12GB of ram 14 years ago, 16 does not seem that bad. With that said, I hate javascript

[@krunkle5136]

There are Silicon Graphics machines that used 16MB of memory and could do anti aliased 3d graphics.

[@linuxguy1199]

I have a system I've been working with for a while, it runs Linux kernel 6.0 with complete GNURadio support, Numpy, Python3, hardware accelerated vector math libraries, and some custom drivers for an FPGA. The whole OS fits in a 32MB flash, and runs on a computer with 512MB RAM, the whole filesystem is decompressed from a 26MB image to become about 200MB and it runs in RAM, this leaves about 300MB for everything else. My desktop (kde crapma on arch) has 32GB and uses about 1GB at idle, my web browser (foxfire) uses around 7GB (granted I have a little under 150 tabs open right now). I only have 32GB of RAM so I can allocate 24GB to modded minecraft and have a playable experience, and yes, the modpacks I play actually require 16GB of RAM after optimizing, but I play some stupid complex modpacks.

[@Pesthuf]

I can't even imagine how much less efficient apps could even get, I think we've already reached peak inefficiency with Electron - but I'm sure that as available RAM continues to increase, the developers of the future will find ways to fill it (without making things any faster)

[@username7763]

Ah, well then you should learn about microservices. You take your application, and split it into multiple web servers that talk to each other. That way a simple function call will take way longer. Then you add security and resiliency to that. You'll find you need a bunch of different computers to run it on because it takes up too many resources running on one. After running on a cluster, you'll find you need a larger cluster because the overhead of the communication is taking up too many resources. You'll need lots of retry logic and extra complexity to ensure the system doesn't go down now that you've multiplied the ways things can break. Now, your software sorta runs ok but is so complicated no one know if it really is or not. But that's ok because you use continuous integration to push out code before it is ready.

[@Pesthuf]

@@username7763 That's a great point. We definitely need to harness this slowness and inefficiency on the desktop. I wonder how long it will take the node.js folks to reinvent COM, except 1000x slower and hungrier for resources.

[@dillenbeck53531]

As a counterpoint, 10 years ago I wasn't streaming KZbin at 1080p or 4k resolutions on a regular basis. Also, while there are definite inefficiencies in algorithm design, remember the trade off between time and space efficiencies. Sure we use a lot more space, but often it is done to maximize time. One thing I did learn recently is that unused ram is wasted ram. If you don't need it at the time, an OS predicting what sections of code you might use and loading it into ram will help speed up your system. If itpredicts wrong or you need the ram? The cost was probably less than what you saved from when it's predictions were right and you weren't using the ram.

[@jensenambrose3333]

Local run LLM require a lot of memory, however maybe they can be put to use to make application more memory efficient . Programs used to be written in low level programming languages which is part of the reason why they used to be less resources intensive.

[@TheRedStarman]

Before refreshing this webpage, Vivaldi was telling me that it was using up 2 GB of RAM.

[@NTFive]

Developpers: We've got 16 gigs of RAM to work with. Let's add some fancy features and eye candy to our app in order to improve the user experience. Hardware manufacturers: nowadays most modern programs require 16 gigs of RAM Let's double that amount on the platform we're developing now in order to stay ahead of the curve...

[@Netist_]

...Improve the user experience?

[@darkmind9244]

think how much power that will use on a global scale.

[@kumanderlinux]

Totally agree with this. It is completely out of control. Just browsing Firefox for a couple of hours, opening a few tabs, results in it consuming 6+ GB. What the heck is even going on?

[@username7763]

But that's the thing, did it make you stop? Did you decide to run a different browser or visit different sites? Unless it causes people to change behavior, performance will be prioritized below everything else.

[@kumanderlinux]

@@username7763 Well, yes. It did make me stop. As for Windows becoming a totalitarian pain in the xxx OS, I created a Debian spin called Kumander Linux. I am only using that for over 2 years now. And as for Firefox being such a memory hog, I am in the process of finding a better alternative. Might give Opera a go, heard good things about it.

[@gabrielpi314]

12:45 This video had major "Old man yells at clouds" vibes... but now you have my attention sir.

[@zyxzevn]

It would be interesting to see the increase related to technology. Here is my expectation: Artificial "Intelligence" is probably related to the latest jump. Necessary to get user private information "legally". The memory requirements for graphics has risen. From 800x600x8 bits to 3840x2160x32 bits + z-buffer for 3D graphics. Language technologies demanded more and more memory. From Assembler to C++ with its templates, Java-JIT, Javascript-engines, etc. All these technologies did not change much of the basic functionality of the computer.

[@MegaLokopo]

By 2039 we are going to be able to give a text prompt to an ai on our own machine and it will make a movie for us in seconds that meets all of our requirements, and it will ask follow up questions if it needs to, and we can refine our prompt and make changes and it will happen locally and in seconds.

[@beskamir5977]

I've had 32GB for the last 5ish years and been slowly feeling like I'm running out of it and need at least 64GB to be able to self host my own LLM.

[@phoenixrising4995]

I have 16GB in VRAM and 16GB of regular RAM kind of crazy where things are headed.

[@ChristianWagner888]

My Commodore PET 2001 had about 16 kilobytes of RAM initially. I later upgraded to a Commodore 64 with 64 kilobytes, which was massive. Even on the Commodore PET, I was able to program simple text to speech output using phonemes around 1981.

[@radornkeldam]

Lunduke's Law : Minimum RAM requirement for desktop OSes doubles every 5 years

[@lordwiadro83]

Recenty, I was able to install the newest Debian 12 on my "vintage" PC, which only has 256 megs of RAM and a Pentium II CPU. Granted, it is only in text mode, and no interesting services are loaded, but the system after boot takes only around 26 MB of RAM.

[@NomenNescio99]

When I came to Uni back in 1992 the CS department had a server with 128 Gb of ram. That was an unfathomable amount of ram for me back then. Today my refrigerator has more memory than that.

[@weeeeeeeeeeeew]

You clearly meant MB, not GB.

[@cem_kaya]

i want Terabytes of ram, Vram and CXL add on memory .

[@xybersurfer]

it's a combination. developers keep using more resources and consumers keep buying new computers. it's a system and we're all part of it

[@casev799]

I swear I read the upload time as "7 years ago" after reading the thumbnail and I got way too confused

[@luisricardohurtadocastro3638]

In 2002 I built a Windows PC with 512 MB of RAM and some time later I added 256 MB, so the total amount of RAM was 768 MB. On that PC I ran Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP

[@steveftoth]

I’d like to see this but for mobile phones from 1995 to now.

[@tonnylins]

There is also the platform requirements to run the firmware. On mac it's a bit different, but on x86, uefi requires many 90's pcs just to run. Oh, and there are the hw drivers the OS has to load... It's impressive, to say the least.

[@hansj4832]

I'd be interested to see how this graph correlates with recommended hard drive space and average disk and Internet bandwidth. I'd hazard that at least some (but certainly not all) of these RAM increases come from the amount of data we're expecting our computers to process every day, probably mostly from video streaming.

[@ScottGrammer]

I'm old enough to remember a time when operating systems were judged by how little Ram they could get away with.

[@NikorouKitsunerou]

For me idle is 20 tabs and two browsers open at any time and that uses 37% @ 64GB ram. I approach 50% when I have Krita open with ComfyUI/Stable Diffusion going on. I sent out a mini pc to a friend that wanted 96GB, I just explained 96GB is really for some server boards running virtual machines. Usually the OS won't allow software to break out of 8/16GB for technical reasons. It's nice to know you can buy a mini pc now and not need to upgrade for 10 years.

[@user-vx9ch6rs1w]

On one side you are right. Windows and even linux are getting out of hand with basic ram usage. Expecially on linux we went from using 600mb of ram to run the os to multi-gig in 4 years and i can't figure out why/for what extra functionality. AntiX is still sub-256 for a full desktop that can use firefox and do everything no issues(it's my go to thin client os ). On the other hand I am typing this on a Surface pro 5 with 8gb on which i installed chrome OS and the difference coming from windows is massive, browsing is orders of magnitute faster, and using it is not causing it to heat to oblivion anymore. On the other hand, you are underestimating the increaasingly resolution of display and how much exponentially higher ram usage is required to disply ultra high-def content. We are starting to have laptops that default to 3k screens, and those textures and pixel need to be stored in ram, expecially if you have an integrated GPU. You talk about photoshop and 3d modeling but that too requires massive amount of ram to operate on the large amount detail we have nowadays from cameras. And running large models locally will take quite a toll on the ram in the future.

[@TheRetroEngine]

Fascinating, I remember 48k spectum etc. And to 1MB on the Amiga, then maybe 1MB on the PC. Now I usee collossal machine in the cloud. Mad stuff really.

[@9mmfederalrimmed235]

In my Dell laptop I bought 2011 I had 8 GB of DDR3 1300 Mhz RAM. That is till today good enough for basic office like things. That's 13 years later. However my Adrenalin software of my RX 6600 on my desktop from 2022 shows that I am using right now with several browsers and tabs open around 8.3 GB of system RAM from the 24 GB I have installed. So it hovers still around 8 GB of RAM but it is not for gaming anymore. At gaming Adrenalin shows up to 12 GB of RAM usage.

[@theweapi]

6:00 You should've used a log scale. Also that's not a bar graph, that's a line graph.

[@mattfromeurope]

Roughly 20 years ago we discussed the same. It was just Megabytes instead of Gigabytes back then. This is just how technology works - but it will surely plateau at some point.

[@little_forest]

I feel similar looking back how much RAM my computers had in the past. But when I finally upgraded to 16gig a year ago, I was actually surprised that it came so late. And of course, this is just a personal experience, but this was, that I had 8 gigs since at least 10 years in my computers and it was totally fine and only upgraded basically cause I needed RAM and the 16gig were so cheap. So my personal RAM size graph does not look like it is still increasing exponentially as it was in the 90s and 2000s. I am still hopeful, that RAM will cap at around 64gigs. But hell yeah, the amount of memory a browser needs...but also how people use browsers. It seems people are under the impression, that they constantly have to have at least 10 to 15 tabs open and then maybe more at times. I think my average is maybe 3 tabs open at the same time, because I close tabs, that I do not use atm.

[@netherportals]

Spaghetti coding is the Kessler syndrome of our day.

[@lowellhouser7731]

I've had 32GB with my 5900X/6800XT combo rig for the last two years. I'll be building a new rig hopefully in two years and I was going to go 64GB just for giggles. I do video editing with Olive which is my current most demanding multi-threaded application other than games. I'm sure some sort of open video editing "AI" will be a thing soon, and I'm sure it will be a resource hog.

[@AmazedStoner]

I was using 8 gigs back in 2010 and 16 gigs around 2016 now it is 2024 I haver 32 gigs and using half of it regularly. I'm unsure of how much ram we will need in 5 years but ultimately the world is heading for persistent ram to be used as storage and a boot device to further reduce load times.

[@spartaninvirginia]

"I've got a bar graph" that's a line graph...

[@NikiDaDude]

Let's not forget that bloat has a cost, and it's not just the money you pay for a new computer. Big tech companies are condemning millions of perfectly working computers to the scrap, and e-waste is not exactly easy to process. And the computers currently working around the world probably waste TWh of electricity just because of software bloat. But don't worry Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. are really serious about protecting the environment!

[@peterjansen4826]

For the PC the graph would look a bit different. Early 00's (Pentium 4 and the AMD equivalant) 256/512 MB of RAM was standard, 8 GB was standard as from 2009 (first Core-CPU from Intel). Around 2015 (DDR got introduced in 2014)16 GB was standard and currently it only got bumped up to 32 GB because of DDR5, 16 GB is the minimum on one stick and you want dual channel RAM (performance) so you end up with 32 GB.

[@OblivifrekTV]

heck Xcode 16 Beta apple's development tools state you need 16 gas or more, so if they say 8gbs is enough then I think they are wrong, so I reckon the next Macs with M4s will have a min of 16gbs

[@VGl0dXM]

alpine linux with xfce needs 200~400mb idle

[@shallex5744]

i saw Mental Outlaw on youtube make his gentoo system with dwm use about 50 mb if i remember correctly

[@LangleyNA]

I built a 2021 AMD Zen2 End-of-Life B550 machine with 32GB of DDR4 memory. I correctly assessed my needs in years earlier. 32GB. I regularly use 16-24GB RAM, which would be paging onto my storage if I didn't build at least a 24GB configuration, but I often surpass even that up to 30-32GB. At this moment, I have 15.7-16GB in use according to WINDOWS 11 Task Manager. 6 Opera web browser windows open, 51 tabs open in Opera, although I believe upwards of 90% of those should be inactive tabs... I configure it not to "snooze" tabs. An iTunes installation, Discord, Steam, bittorrenting, NVIDIA display driver, f.lux, "auto dark mode," PowerToys, some lovely background services, ... Task Manager claims Opera is using only about 5GB of RAM, and nothing else is using even 1GB of RAM. Math doesn't add up, right? I tallied the few things over 100MB and it's still less than 7GB in use. So you tell me. Ahahahaha. _You tell me._

[@LangleyNA]

Clarification. I configure Opera not to "snooze" tabs, which I think would relieve RAM if you're not using those tabs, but then I also tell it not to automatically load ALL tabs when you launch the browser. It waits for me to click a tab to load it. That's because I'm on a terribly low-bandwidth connection I suggest should be illegal (_Laugh out loud_) in this era of 1080p+, 1080p60fps, live streaming, and high resolution panels.

[@w3w3w3]

I was using a crappy £200 laptop that had windows on it for like 4-5 years, it had 4gb ram and 32gb drive 😆(this is whilst i made the videos on my youtube channel). I had to rely on making virtual memory using disk so i could use applications without them crashing (i would add like 20gb page file on disk, etc). I also could not update windows due to the small 32gb drive.... and i relied basicaly on my 64gb sd card as my "home" folder... and using vps a lot as well. Now i am on a decent laptop with 16gm ram, 16 inch screen, 16:10, etc.... LG Gram 16 😃

[@SCTproductionsJ5]

RAM requirements have lagged behind what computers typically need to not be bottle-necked for yearrrsss. 16GB is the minimum for even the 2014 shop PCs at the company I work at, 32 for the new ones, and 64gb for the power users.

[@catwhisperer911]

I predict that memory itself will radically change and that in the not too distant future memory will then have very little in common with what it is today. This will be driven and motivated by the need to keep costs obtainable and to be able to quickly scale up as technology advances.

[@lordkekz4]

I've been running 16GB since 2015, and 64GB in my Laptop since 2022. I don't _need_ that memory for word processing! I _want_ that memory because I can afford it and it still speeds up the system. I'm running Linux on my Laptop and it idles (full desktop with background apps) at

[@username7763]

I had 8GB of ram in a PC I built back in 2007. I put 32GB of ram in my current PC I built in 2012. While yes, software has gotten crazy bloated, computers have not kept up with the dropping prices and increasing density of ram. I don't think it is unreasonable to have 32gb or more be a minimum. 32GB costs $50 these days. I remember buying 1MB SIMMs for that price each. It just doesn't make sense to save the $5 or $10 you'll save by cutting that in half for a machine that will last you a decade or more.

[@OblivifrekTV]

I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years min requirements could be 64gbs or 128gbs

[@zloboslav_]

In many workplaces you need to keep open and switch between: a dozen browser tabs, a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, some chat/meeting client and maybe some specific company software. Many companies haven't upgraded from 8GB and it been slow, unstable and painful for like 4 years now. People are struggling and I blame the software companies and their awful practices. No one cares about optimizing anything anymore.

[@LedoCool1]

When will they not be able to add any more ram?

[@circumferenc]

Chrome reports more than 50mb usage for one of the open tabs. The address for that page reads about:blank. This is crazy

[@Netist_]

RAM requirements increasing, but the features aren't. People aren't working with larger files or anything. Word documents, spreadsheets, power points, they're all the same size as they have been. Why do RAM requirements keep increasing? This is a rhetorical question--we know the answer.

[@samshort365]

I remember when having 32MB of ram meant you had a main frame computer. My Exisy Sorcerer came with 32kb on board and I had to spend a fortune to get to 56k with an S100 expansion bus the size of a desktop computer.

[@ustrucx]

We'll need all of it, all the RAM.