Recent comments in /f/mildlyinteresting

tokynambu t1_j1tq28j wrote

Reply to comment by Almost_a_circle359 in 32 kB of RAM from 1974 compared to 32 GB of RAM today by Aegisx3

No, it isn’t. That is why cpus need a lot of pipelining and speculative execution and caching and the like.

Mid 1980s, the choice when buying asynchronous RAM was, if memory serves, 70ns or 35ns latency. That when a fast processor was less than 20MHz (a Sun 3/160 was a 68020 clocked at 16.67MHz). So one cycle was about 60ns, and processors did not need to wait for RAM.

Today synchronous memory has a first word latency of the order of 10ns; that isn’t exactly the same as asynchronous latency but approximately comparable. But the processor is running at, say, 3GHz. So now, instead of people able to read RAM in a clock cycle or at most two, you need 30 cycles to access RAM. Clock is ~100x faster, RAM latency is only ~3x better. The RAM is much faster in bulk transfer (perhaps 50x or more) which helps for some operations, but a single random read is not helped.

Hence cache, pipelines, speculative execution, caches, more caches.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency

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Flash_ina_pan t1_j1tp270 wrote

Reply to comment by ShannonsParade in $44,999 50 year Balvenie Scotch whisky by Android9765

It's mostly an advertising gimmick for those places. Word of mouth about the oddity of a 45k bottle of liquor, making the average person feel classy by shopping in a place that has it, or fishing for a bar/restaurant to buy it.

That being said, I've had the opportunity to try some liquors in the 3-6k range, and for me, while the liquor was very good, I would not purchase a bottle of it. My topline is right in the 300 range and that's only once every couple of years.

You can do extremely well in the 80-120$ range if you are looking for a sipping whiskey.

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