how funny is this, we used to spend weeks fitting assets into 4MB, and now we spend weeks trying to figure out why a 'Hello World' microservice is OOM-ing in a container with 2GB.
We traded the 'Mo RAM' for 'Mo Layers,' and in the process, we lost the ability to reason about what the hardware is actually doing. Sanglard’s breakdowns are always a sobering cold shower for those of us pampered by modern GC and JITs
Around the turn of the millennium I had a Sony Vaio 505TX, which had the same chipset. My machine was running Linux, and I maxed it out to 128MB RAM.
There was a kernel patch for this chipset back then, which treated all memory above the lower 64MB as a RAM disk, which could then be used as swap space.
This prioritized the faster portion of RAM while still having very fast swapping.
Too late to edit - I just saw that the Vaio in fact had the 430TX chipset, not the 430FX. Both were artificially capped at 64MB of fast RAM, as they were late Pentium chipsets, and Intel rather wanted to sell the then-new Pentium II chips and chipsets if you wanted to have more memory.
It is funny to see how these older machines perform at their higher end limits. I'm guessing the idea on this was that if you needed that much RAM, the sacrifice of L2 cache was a worth while trade off.
It was only a few weeks ago that I found out the original BeBOX computers would switch off L2 cache when running in dual CPU mode. It was just a limitation of the memory controller. Again, the thinking of, if you need the extra compute over memory bus it would be a worth while trade off.
Looks like the BeBox motherboard didn't have the external L2 in the first place.
Besides web sources, logic dictates this as well: Since dual-cpu was its selling point, it wouldn't make sense to ship a disabled L2 implementaton on the mobo at extra cost. There was no single-cpu model.
Honestly asking though is it worth that trade off? I enjoy watching people benchmark older Intel x86 based chips and without cache they are frankly awful slow. I'm not sure two without cache beat one with. The BeBox did run a totally different processor though so I have zero domain knowledge for that which is why I'm genuinely curious.
I had a desktop PC that I bought (as a pile of bits!) with 512MB of RAM in 1999 and I sure as hell didn't pay more than a couple of hundred for memory. That might have been EDO rather than SDRAM though but I can't see the price difference being that much!
This would have also still been true even roughly a decade later, during which time the industry was going through a transition from 32-bit computing to 64-bit, and large amounts of RAM read from BIOS in pre-UEFI systems were slower to boot the more memory you had!
Imagine young would-become engineers at the time finding that adding that second stick to their laptop did in fact, not make their systems magically faster.
We traded the 'Mo RAM' for 'Mo Layers,' and in the process, we lost the ability to reason about what the hardware is actually doing. Sanglard’s breakdowns are always a sobering cold shower for those of us pampered by modern GC and JITs
There was a kernel patch for this chipset back then, which treated all memory above the lower 64MB as a RAM disk, which could then be used as swap space.
This prioritized the faster portion of RAM while still having very fast swapping.
It was only a few weeks ago that I found out the original BeBOX computers would switch off L2 cache when running in dual CPU mode. It was just a limitation of the memory controller. Again, the thinking of, if you need the extra compute over memory bus it would be a worth while trade off.
Besides web sources, logic dictates this as well: Since dual-cpu was its selling point, it wouldn't make sense to ship a disabled L2 implementaton on the mobo at extra cost. There was no single-cpu model.
Imagine young would-become engineers at the time finding that adding that second stick to their laptop did in fact, not make their systems magically faster.