Agreed in full. My development desktop, a repurposed Westmere PowerEdge tower, has 96GB of RAM in it. The value I realize from being able to load everything I care about, ever into RAM significantly outstrips a faster CPU (not that 16 logical cores at 2.8GHz is holding me up or anything). Turns out that ramdisks are super fast--who'd have thought?
Good to see likeminded people here on that subject. I used to push RAM drives, etc in late 90's to early 2000's for critical stuff. People said it was crazy but performance and security benefits were great. Being re-discovered in past 5 years or so in cloud industry in form of "RAM sleds," etc. As if RAM making stuff faster was a new thing. ;)
Another benefit of tons of RAM is in special-purpose systems using memory-safe runtime and GC. The copying GC's were relatively simple to implement for me a while ago. When RAM expanded, I had one design that just used it for GC instead of more storage. Lots of space not utilized in normal case but imagine a whole app/service GC'd while running on tiny kernel w/ good exception handling. Never crashed. Imagine a desktop where similarly all the system services were memory safe and GC'd with a dedicated piece of hardware doing pauseless, concurrent GC. So, a crashless, fast desktop with critical stuff stored in RAM. I'll take it.
Note: Oberon Systems (eg A2 Bluebottle) use a GC language and run very fast. That with modern features, HW acceleration, and user-mode drivers.
Holy crap. Just checked ebay. I didn't realize how cheaply you could get ridiculous equipment like that. There's an older PowerEdge with 48GB of RAM for around $600. Hmmm... the credit card is feeling warm in my pocket...
