DRAM Growth May Slow as Operating Systems Get Leaner
Operating system have been one of the major drivers for DRAM demand, and have experienced an almost persistent boost since the introduction on Windows 95 in 1994 - back then we were asked to upgrade our computers from a modest 4 MB of DRAM to 8 MB.
IHS now says that the trend of quickly growing DRAM demand may come to an end as leaner operating system do not call for rapid increases anymore.
"The growth rate of dynamic random access memory content in personal computers is set for a historic decline, with the average annual increase in DRAM amount for each new PC not expected to exceed 35% after 2012, down from an average 48% during the last quarter-century," IHS said. "After climbing 38% in 2009 and 25% in 2010, average DRAM content per PC will rise 30% in 2011 and 35% in 2012," IHS noted. "The year 2012, however, will represent the last high point for growth, with the amount of annual DRAM content growth in the following years expected to be significantly less than 35%." IHS said that DRAM growth per PC was 48% between 1985 and 2009 and ranged from 40 to 45% in the early 2000s.
The market research firm stressed that, historically, each new version of Windows demanded more memory, but that pattern broke with Windows 7: "From Windows 7’s release in 2009 until a year later, DRAM content growth per PC actually dropped 13% - auguring the kind of lower expansion rates likely to be seen in the years to come."
Microsoft already said that Windows 8 will not have hardware requirements that exceed Windows 7's requirements. Instead of operating systems, it appears that memory drivers will be shifting to more computing devices as well as applications, which would include more applications running at the same time as well as increased use of multimedia.
"As the appetite for digital data swells continually among consumers, so too will the memory requirements needed to feed the ravening beast," IHS said.
They could make HDs out of DRAM. The problem is that DRAM is volatile and doesn't retain information once the power is turned off. So say good by to whatever data you put on there.
Notice he said solid state HD, not ram drives.
Microsoft has been able to over 30 years to increase memory use (and processor use) without increasing functionality in a seamless and elegant way. They even convinced people that Windows 7 was faster and leaner than Windows Vista, even though all tests showed otherwise. Even the great Jobs has yet to accomplish this act of "I'll tell you the truth, forget what you think you see".
It's a common ploy for OS manufacturers to say requirements aren't going up, but then the thing doesn't work quite as well, and recommended requirements are a bit higher.
Give Microsoft some respect. Windows 8 will be slower and require more memory without doing anything extra that anyone finds useful. They've done it for years, and to expect otherwise is simply insulting to Microsoft's ability to bloat and slow down. While there's a saying in the industry that Microsoft has sold more processors than Intel marketing, I think it's also fair to say they've sold more memory than any memory makers marketing.
Have faith, they will continue to. Taking billions of bytes of memory without added functionality is a talent. Selling it in numbers, worthy of great respect. Don't count them out.
Source?
you have anything better to do? you seriously need to get of the basement buddy.
Trollalalala
I agree with the above, provide your source? Back up your BS with some facts from the get go next time.
I hadn't realized that there was free software allowing you to do this. Awesome.
Anyhow, yeah there are quite a few free programs that let you play with ramdisks. The two I've used are Imdisk and Softperfect Ramdisk.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/
Imdisk is really useful as it's 100% command line driven and easily incorporated into startup / shutdown scripts.
You know how to use Google, or haven't learned it yet? Do a search, it's all over the place. Windows 7 in virtually every benchmark is slower than Vista, although only very slightly.
But the funny part is, the people who post here actually think it's a lot faster. This is how easy it is to fool the uninformed, who can't think for themselves, and read somewhere, from someone, that it was faster. So, they just go along with it.
Do a Google on it, read the results, make a smarter post. Like you should have in the first place. It's all there. I'll give you a hint. www.google.com
If companies like Microsoft were to limit their programmers to modern systems that are down clocked to like 200MHz and 512MB RAM, you will see major improvements in system performance, just because modern computers have more memory and CPU power does not mean you need to make the OS more demanding.
On my windows xp install, at startup the system only uses about 40MB ram, On windows 7 that memory usage jumps to over 1GB.
When loading different things built into the OS, the hard drive light stays on longer under windows 7 than windows xp
Loading less data is faster than loading more data
If microsoft wants a truly successful Os that will quickly gain all of the windows user base. Then make a new OS that has requirements along the lines of windows 98 or windows 95, just with the modern instruction sets
A leaner SO always improves performance, for example on a linksys wrt54g if you move from the stock linksys firmware to a lighter firmware such as tomato, the routers simultaneous connection throughput increases along with the max number of connections it can handle with huge performance increase noticed when using peer-to-peer programs such as bittorrent.
The main difference is the tomato firmware uses far fewer resources so more memory can be dedicated to handling a larger number of connections and the lower CPU usage frees up the CPU so more CPU resources can be focused on improving throughput on a large number of simultaneous transfers.
Even with professional programs the newer versions tend to run faster on older hardware because the developers focus on reducing the resource usage. for example a program like maya, with new versions you will see the main program use less resources allowing for more resources to be dedicated to the more time sensitive tasks such as rendering
all OS makers need to focus on reducing resource use so that there will be more free resources that can be dedicated to running the programs that the user wants to run.
Your OS should not have the system requirements of half life 2. The job of the Os is to provide an environment for a user to run their programs.
If you don't believe me then ask your self, would you use a OS like windows, linux or the mac OS if they only allowed you to run the OS and not install any additional applications?