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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip
https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_camera_ready.pdf https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_cam...
- rock_artist 2mo agoThe interesting part of this "RAM crisis" is similar to other fields where a problem results multiple parties looking for alternative solutions. This yields for exciting ideas or workarounds that might result a post-crisis memory boom (hopefully) also for local machines. 1. Lowest, Apple is evaluating new Chinese manufacturer which means change of supply demand if indeed it has reasonable QA. (https://www.ft.com/content/f4ac5c92-03be-4499-b16a-017a7e9ee228 https://www.ft.com/content/f4ac5c92-03be-4499-b16a-017a7e9ee...) 2. Companies tries to workaround performance - suddenly single channel is 'ok' ? :) (https://www.gigabyte.com/press/news/2403 https://www.gigabyte.com/press/news/2403)
- egorfine 2mo ago> suddenly single channel is 'ok' Single channel RAM surely beats any disk-based swap.
- rock_artist 2mo agoof course, but I was under the impression the real shortage is RAM mostly.
- varispeed 2mo agoIf you don't have RAM you swap, so it is still better to at least ensure swap is a little bit faster.
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoNecessity is the mother of invention.
- dofm 2mo agoNecessity is the mother of invention, after all. (One of the oldest abstract concepts in intellectual thought, I suspect.) There is a tight resource starvation/motivation loop — the demand put on RAM and SSD and GPUs by the largest frontier models is a direct motivation to make smaller LLMs. Like an evolutionary pressure making animals smaller and more food-efficient. These smaller models, once successful, are still likely to consume more RAM and SSD and GPUs than any other application short of high quality video processing itself (the smaller LLMs and higher end video processing seem to have about the same needs). But the resources would distribute through the market more traditionally, leading to less insane cycles. So it seems to me that the way out of the RAM/SSD price cycle crisis that manufacturers are in — where the price fluctuates between high and low due to supply constraints and then oversupply from new production capacity - is for them to fund research into smaller LLMs. They'll still sell essentially the same amount of product. Maybe more.
- HumblyTossed 2mo agoI would love it if we started designing software with hardware constraints in mind again.
- porksoda 2mo agoWe do already, if it ooms at 32g I have to prompt again /s
- overfeed 2mo agoConsumer hardware costs are external. We are in the era of ignoring externalized costs, for example, Windows 11 hardware requirements, social media harm, and mainstreaming of gambling. Maybe the pendulum will swing back in the future, but today, line-going-up is the prime directive.
- thewhitetulip 2mo agoSince AI generated code is everywhere, most people don't read code anymore. Forget about hyper optimization
- rob74 2mo agoWhy not go directly to the source article that has a lot more details? https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/29/zuck-saves-meta-bucks-by-reusing-memory-from-old-servers-with-a-custom-cxl-asic/5263483 https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/29/zuck-saves-me...
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> Why not go directly to the source article Which seems to be the sister site of Register; https://www.blocksandfiles.com/architecture/2026/06/26/panmnesia-boosts-cxl-scale-with-fabric-switching-meta-repurposes-old-dram-with-cxl/5263151 https://www.blocksandfiles.com/architecture/2026/06/26/panmn...
- pjc50 2mo agoSource paper linked is https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_camera_ready.pdf https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_cam... From a quick skim, you could think of this as roughly equivalent to shoving a large amount of DDR4 on a PCIe card and using it as a swap space. It's more sophisticated (see CXL protocol), but that gives you an idea of the tradeoffs. It seems there is some OS-level support for moving hot/cold pages between the main fast DRAM and the expansion higher latency DRAM. It's a very valid point that DRAM has a fairly long lifetime and contains significant embedded carbon emissions, as well as the current availability crisis of new DRAM.
- herodoturtle 2mo ago> and contains significant embedded carbon emissions Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above? Genuinely curious :)
- jzb 2mo agoIt’d be nice if there were a consumer version of this. I have plenty of old RAM.
- keanebean86 2mo agoGigabyte had a ram disk addin card years ago. Not exactly the same but since it's presented as a storage device you could use it as OS swap space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
- edb_123 2mo agoCXL Vistara reminds me a bit of the AST Rampage 286 memory expansion ISA card I had in my 286 back in the day, as a kid. Things go in circles, I guess.
- darksim905 2mo agoobservation that I've noticed recently: what's with wikipedia downsizing the hell out of images site wide? Every image I look at is garbage and I have to dig through multiple links to find the original.
- 3form 2mo agoI saw this with screenshots already for like 10-15 years now? It's some overly conservative policy to comply with fair use. I recall a page outlining that you should basically pick the minimum possible resolution that still allows you to distinguish the features of interest. I get why they do this, but it's really horrible from archiving and accessibility perspectives... And I would like to treat Wikipedia as one of the main archives of the world's collective knowledge. All this goes to my "world has gone insane over IP law" bucket. Similar to people disallowing their games being streamed or even shared in screenshots.
- qlte 2mo agoI don’t think that’s applicable here? It says the source photo was uploaded as original content by a user in 2011 as a 400x300 JPEG created on an iPhone 3GS per EXIF data, with copyright released as public domain. There’s nothing to suggest it was downscaled in the log or copyright encumbered, it just looks like it’s old/small. I often click into Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons images where the original is available as a super high resolution option in addition to various smaller thumbnails. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRAM13a.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRAM13a.JPG
- lizknope 2mo agoThere are standard product CXL memory expander chips if you don't want to design a custom chip. https://www.marvell.com/products/cxl.html https://www.marvell.com/products/cxl.html
- fl4regun 2mo agothere's multiple vendors even https://www.asteralabs.com/products/leo-cxl-smart-memory-controllers/ https://www.asteralabs.com/products/leo-cxl-smart-memory-con...
- torginus 2mo agoWith regards to RAM price I never understood the following: A 16GB RAM stick has 16*8=128 billion bits, with 1 transistor per bit, thats still 128B, yet its supposed to cost like $60 before the price hikes? In contrast, a 5090 GPU was $2000 (true it has RAM, but you're paying for the GPU ASIC really, I guess the rest of the GPU was less than $500), it had 93B transistors. GPU transistors are smaller due to the more advanced process node (cost per transistor metrics aren't really clear, if they improve on advanced node or not, but I'd say they get cheaper as they get smaller, as technology costs are amortized). I'm sure both RAM and logic use a process that is quite similar in both inputs and manufacturing steps. So while RAM is a commodity product, this insane price difference didn't make any sense. So I guess when those fundamental inputs become a constraint, it would make sense for $/transistor move closer for both, which is a massive hike for RAM.
- Lomlioto 2mo agoA GPU Transistor is a lot more complicated than a RAM transistor and the size of these are quite different too. Bleeding edge vs. a known process with know machines and written off machines. Also you calculate in the machine cost and R&D. RAM hiked because the demand spiked and these companies are now in power. Before apple and other companies told them the prices and had hardly any money for investment.
- mschuster91 2mo ago> So while RAM is a commodity product, this insane price difference didn't make any sense. Supply and demand coupled with the fact that a RAM fab can't (trivially) output compute chips, and vice versa, a compute fab can't output RAM. It's two completely different supply chains.
- rmu09 2mo agoThe thing that defines performance of DRAM is AFAIK the capacitor of the bit cells and not the transistor driving it. And also AFAIK the process to create those capacitors is quite unique to DRAM, so you can't just go and use a "logic" process unchanged and produce DRAMs.
- adastra22 2mo ago
- dana321 2mo agoSupply-demand economics really went awry in the age of chasing agi
- pmontra 2mo agoIf they grow desperate I have GBs of DDR2 AND DDR3 in a drawer.
- annagio_ 2mo agoMake sure to charge them double!
- cynicalsecurity 2mo agoYou've got a friend request form Zuck
- papascrubs 2mo agoI've got some RDRAM-- still waiting for the RAMBUS revolution, any day now
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agoFrom the paper: "Our CXL solution achieves substantial gains for diverse workloads, including up to a 25% reduction in server count for disaggregated ML inference" How does using worse RAM result in 25% reduction of server count for given workloads?
- virajk_31 2mo agoif not the prices, no one would have implemented this in large scale solution..
- ateles 2mo agoServeTheHome already reported on CLX memory expansion controllers back in December: https://www.servethehome.com/hyper-scalers-are-using-cxl-to-lower-the-impact-of-ddr5-supply-constraints-marvell-arm/ https://www.servethehome.com/hyper-scalers-are-using-cxl-to-...
- kjs3 2mo agoI have always wondered why there was never a big market[1] for "cheap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e card you can stick a boatload of your old/surplus/n-generation old simms/dimms on and use as swap/slow memory/ram disk/etc". It's rare you can populate a motherboard with a full address space full of 'new' memory, and you can teach kernels to prefer some memory to others because of speed[2], so it seems like a no-brainer. I seem to remember the market for doing similar with flash got neutered over patent issues, but I can't recall the details. And flash cache did end up being a market, at least for bigger players. Maybe something similar happened here, or maybe it just hit a niche I cared about at the time? [1] I know there were a handful of products in this space, but my impression is they never really took off. I could be wrong. [2] Definitely can in NetBSD; I've done it for archs like VMEbus where it's common to have a small, fast on board memory and much slower, often larger memory out on the bus. I assume this sort of thing is enabled in Linux by the work to support NUMA, but I've never looked into it.
- chadgpt3 2mo agoThey used to exist
- kjs3 2mo agoGo back and read beyond the first sentence; you'll see I said exactly that.
- grepfru_it 2mo agoKind of. You referenced flash memory. However I owned an ibm ps/2 from the 80s which had an MCA memory card which could accept SIMMs and extend system ram. So maybe the previous poster is being pedantic? No need to downvote them
- kjs3 2mo agoYes...I remember the model 80. The cards you're talking about are 1) a design choice IBM made to use MCA as the official way to expand memory in the machine and not something any PCI bus machine I'm aware of followed, and 2) used the same generation memory as the planar memory. I don't think you're talking apples to oranges. YMMV. I'm not sure where 'pedantic', especially when coupled with 'contributes nothing to the discussion', wasn't worthy of a downvote (which I didn't give), but I'm sure there's a "well, ackshually..." rationale there someplace. Edit: extra 'not' removed.
- amelius 2mo agoIn the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way.
- TacticalCoder 2mo ago> In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way. China is desperate to sell anything to... everyone. If there's a market, they'll eventually be there to fill it. It took them decades for cars, but now they did it. For RAM, CXMT went from 20 000 wafers per month to... 240 000 wafers per month in something like two years. And they're extending capacity massively now. It's a company only 10 years old. The market is there and China shall flood it: that's how they operate with everything. At some point they'll probably even come with GPUs that shall do 80% of the job for 20% of the price. Just like you can buy chinese server motherboards at 1/5th the price of a SuperMicro one today. So I'm not sure hardware is going to be only for big companies: China is going to put pressure on the OpenAI and Anthropic of this world locking all the RAM / SSDs / chips of this world.
- amelius 2mo agoCan you buy Chinese cars without the Multimedia/GPS computer and "phone home" system?
- alex43578 2mo agoMaybe? But there's honestly not much market for this, as I'd guess less than 1% of the population cares about this. Particularly since they're already carrying a phone anyway.
- serf 2mo agothere isn't a market for barebones for the sake of privacy, but there is a market apparently for 'barebones for the sake of value', which is what the whole Slate truck thing is attacking. I'm sure a chinese EV group could key in on the same pure-value market if there isn't a group already doing that. 'Golf carts for the street.'
- snowwrestler 2mo agoAt the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.
- AdamN 2mo agoIt's sort of a cool idea. "Pre-RAM" without the tracking/AI integration so it can be used for clandestine activities in a dystopian future.
- kilpikaarna 2mo agoIt's 3MB of "hot" RAM, IIRC. Makes sense.
- ecshafer 2mo agoEarly computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.
- dfedbeef 2mo ago3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but
- bigbuppo 2mo agoMake your secondary storage smarter.
- neonmagenta 2mo agoI remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.
- annagio_ 2mo agohow the mighty have fallen! Can't wait to see
- HumblyTossed 2mo agoIt will be interesting to see what happens to the consumer electronics market the next few years. Companies are right now gambling that consumers will pay extra because of RAM shortages. I suspect with the cost of everything else rising as well, a large portion of consumers (remember, HN, not everyone makes tech money) will just not be buying new devices for a bit.
- CTDOCodebases 2mo agoI think I'm in this boat. I'm just choosing to interact with technology less. Everything has just gotten more hostile that it has reached a tipping point.
- Cyan488 2mo agoI'm with you on this one. I'll be using my 11th gen i5 and GTX3080 for the foreseeable future. The 'hostility' you mention puts me off doing so more than price of an upgrade.
- ColdStream 2mo agoI just upgraded from a Lenovo T400 to a Carbon X1 4th gen for $100. I can ride out this storm longer than the storm can continue. My needs are much lower than what the market demands.
- downrightmike 2mo agoOS makers are going to have to support older hardware longer. Win10 is already pushed out another year because MSFT tried to force new hardware for Win11.
- srean 2mo agoNow to rip RAM off PCs being sent to the landfills.
- darksim905 2mo agoI fail to see why you couldn't also literally just stack RAM chips themselves on top of each other. If it works for stupid consoles (see NES/Dreamcast/PS1/PS2 hacking of recent), PCs should be no different.
- srean 2mo agoI am waiting for folks to confirm that pulling them off machines designated for the landfills was a thing.
- glitchc 2mo agoNot terribly exciting at 1/10th the bandwidth and double the latency. That's a heavy price to pay to use old DDR4 memory.
- fmajid 2mo agoProbably good enough for memcached type applications
- ok123456 2mo agoLiterally the "new old thing": https://www.andysarcade.net/store2/all-other-stuff/vintage-computing/obsolete-ram-simms/72-pin-simms/4x30pin-to-72pin-simm-adapter-a.html https://www.andysarcade.net/store2/all-other-stuff/vintage-c...
- jvdongen 2mo agoIt reminded me more about these kind of things actually: https://www.ebay.com/itm/277636244509 https://www.ebay.com/itm/277636244509 (ISA RAM Expansion Boards from the PC/XT era)
- piinbinary 2mo agoI wonder if it would ever start to make sense to burn an AI model into ROM, replacing a large portion of an inference machine's RAM with ROM. (Probably not, since I'm sure those machines do dual-duty and run training when the inference workload slows down)
- jmillikin 2mo agoThat's the idea behind Taalas (https://taalas.com https://taalas.com), except as silicon rather than ROM. They run a demo at https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://chatjimmy.ai/ which serves an old open weights model (Llama 3.1 8B) at something like 15,000 tokens per second.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoCompanies are building chips specialized for inference, so dual use for training isn't necessarily a consideration, but there are other considerations such as: Weights need to be loaded into the accelerator's processor fast, which means they need to be physically adjacent to it, but there is limited physical space for that - not enough to fit the all the weights of a 1T+ param model, so weights get loaded into VRAM dynamically according to what part of the model is being run. ROM (I guess we're talking Flash memory) can be dense, since it is built vertically - many hundreds of layers, but this comes at the cost of poor performance, so even if you could fit enough ROM next to the processor it would not be fast enough.
- trkarlb 2mo agoThere is already a data center oversupply. xAI rents out colossus and Meta also rents out capacity.
- mondainx 2mo agoIt'd be interested to see how one could leverage all the DDR3 ECC that they may have laying about; maybe an overseas shopping site has these boards available? Would DDR3 be as fast or faster than an SSD?
- oh_no 2mo agotop of the line SSDs now eclipse DDR3 throughput, but DDR3 should retain a large edge in latency of orders of magnitude absolutely no idea how useful any of that would be and what kind of latency degradation going through whatever adapter would cause
- asdefghyk 2mo agoWE need to learn to use computing resources more efficently. Use RAM more efficently.Todays software just squanders computing resources.- like RAM
- emsign 2mo agoWho would have thought that the hardware I own didn't go down in value for the first time in my life but almost doubled in value.
- blobbers 2mo agoI am have an old Pentium 4 with RDRAM, think I could sell it to them? I think it has like 256MB. Haven't turned it on in awhile. Hope the first 640KB still work.
- ChoGGi 2mo agoRam drives are making a comeback :) Time to dust off my DDRDrive
- cliglot 2mo ago[flagged]
- nullstyle 2mo agoLol
- bushbaba 2mo agoWonder if Intel optain will would have made a huge comeback.
- baerbelblue 2mo ago[dead]
- platevoltage 2mo agoYeah seriously. Thanks for ruining everything I love.
- BrtByte 2mo agoThe impressive part is not really reusing old RAM, its making the economics work despite the extra chip, software support and operational complexity
- palmotea 2mo agoOh good, so now the prices of used RAM can go through the roof, too. Man, I hope the price of a PC goes back to being equivalent to a car. So many monetization opportunities there.
- lowbloodsugar 2mo agoIt already is. Used 5yo DDR4 is currently priced more than it did new 5yrs ago.
- platevoltage 2mo agoIt makes me happy hearing that Meta has been relegated to sloppy seconds.
- kev009 2mo agoThis sounds somewhat similar to IBM's Centaur used on the POWER9/10/11. Some of the POWER9 hardware people ended up at Meta so might be related.
- dang 2mo agoUrl changed from https://www.networkworld.com/article/4192827/meta-reuses-old-ram-in-new-servers-with-custom-bridge-chip.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/4192827/meta-reuses-old..., which points to this. (I've linked to the paper in the toptext as well.) Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- teleforce 2mo ago>All Linux kernel CXL driver code in use for Vistara is either present in the upstream kernel, or is on its way to being included in the upstream kernel
- rldjbpin 2mo agothe title is doing the heavy lifting here. the paper discusses how they apply an existing standard (CXL), to provide an intermediate memory tier in a niche use case: > Each MemServer combines 768 GB of DDR5 memory alongside 256 GB of DDR4 connected through Vistara ASICs. while the ratio above would be nice the other way around, this approach surely adds enough latency to make it comparable to intel optane than system memory at face value. this should not take away ddr4 supply for those who would like to run it at home.
- cyberelf77 2mo ago[flagged]
- westurner 3mo agoScholarlyArticle: "Vistara: Making CXL Real—Full Path from ASIC Design and OS Support to Hyperscale Deployment" (2026) https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_camera_ready.pdf https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_cam... TIL there are 2x 2.5GbE PCI-E HAT adapters for Pi 5. How to attach RAM to the new NVLink/UALink fiber buses?