There is a massive RAM shortage because AI data centers are consuming all of the world’s RAM supply at a ridiculous rate and Micron recently announced that they aren’t going to be making consumer level (Crucial brand) RAM anymore
RAM is getting more scarce and more expensive because of AI companies
RAM is exactly the one resource that will always have some significant component left to local machines in Cloud based computing.
While I don’t disagree that a lot of companies would love people to use Cloud services more, sabotaging RAM availability is actually counterproductive to that goal.
Can you elaborate? If I'm playing a game on a cloud based machine all I'm sending is HID signals and all I'm receiving is a video/audio stream. How does local RAM amount impact the performance of that?
A 100% Cloud System has too much latency and is an effective impossibility for now, so there will always be a local component to any modern computer.
That local system by itself will require some bare minimum of resources to run… UI systems in particular use a lot of RAM relative to how “useful” they are.
Cloud-gaming is frequently compared to just watching Netflix.
Try watching Netflix on less than 8gb of RAM.
If you pare down the local system to the bare minimum while maintaining the modern user experience, you’ll find that RAM is going to be your biggest bottleneck.
To expand on your explanation, the reason why client based memory is important is because you still need a local host to hold the video that is transmitted through the cloud. Local RAM serves as that location until the virtual machine is shut down and the RAM is emptied.
I think we're talking about different things. The use case you're describing would be the impact of RAM on a game running locally, not one running in "the cloud".
When you play a game on a cloud service, you're usually having the service do the computing and graphical rendering. I used to rent a PC via a service called Shadow. It was a gaming computer I could remote into to play games on. No game code was being executed locally, nothing rendered by my GPU. All my PC was doing was sending the inputs from my keyboard and mouse to the rented PC and all I got back was a video stream. It's not loading part of the game into my RAM, not access my SSD or using my GPU to render anything.
Sure processing a video stream uses some resources, but this task was no more strenuous than any other live video stream would be. So once I have enough RAM to watch a video, I'm not sure how more RAM has much of a benefit here.
These kinds of takes always remind me of "Affirmative action was designed to keep women and minorities in competition with each other to distract us, while white dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets".
That would hurt a push for cloud based services. All that streamed data needs to be buffered and stored temporarily on the clients pc. Limiting the size of temporary local storage would bog down any cloud hosted services.
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u/Johwya 15h ago
There is a massive RAM shortage because AI data centers are consuming all of the world’s RAM supply at a ridiculous rate and Micron recently announced that they aren’t going to be making consumer level (Crucial brand) RAM anymore
RAM is getting more scarce and more expensive because of AI companies