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DRAM Makers Suffer Due to Lackluster Vista Adoption
quixote9 writes "We've heard conflicting estimates of how widely adopted Vista has been. Now comes some hard data. DRAM makers ramped up to meet the huge expected demand for more memory needed by Vista. Except the demand hasn't materialized. Now they're suffering. Alternatively, maybe everyone's cleverly hacked their Ultimate Aero Glass Vista to fit on their old PCs."
people are using Vista without Aero Glass?
/is/ possible my friends.
It
If the RAM manufacturers are building up stocks of RAM that nobody is buying then maybe they'll start pushing the prices down further to make it more attractive. Then those of us who are using Linux benefit again from Vista's lack of adoption. :)
Maybe the people care more about doing work than how they look doing it? Eye candy is nice, but it's not necessary. It's not going to make or break a purchase in the way that productivity enhancements would, and even then, people make do with what they have. The more versions that get released of whatever software, the less incentive to upgrade as it gets closer to "it works", and less people will care about improving the software the further along it gets. Throw money in and then people have even more reservations!
Twinstiq, game news
I'm not saying this is good or bad, but DRAM sales may lag now, but eventually people will be moving to Vista when it becomes the sole option on new machines.
RAM getting cheaper is always a good thing, mainly because on 95% of most people's machines, the biggest performance bottleneck is RAM (or lack of) forcing apps to swap.
And almost every new computer comes with Vista. I bought a new laptop and it came with Vista and only 512Mb of RAM. Man was it slow. I suppose I could have gone out and put a couple of Gig into it but I just wiped it and install Ubuntu. It's real peppy now!
Maybe they were pointing out how a typo could confuse the users while trying to make a joke about DRM? ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Not only is firefox a hog (as mentioned above), but caching will cause higher reported ram usage than is actually required/used.
"You idiots spent years screeching about how Vista was going to require jilliobytes of RAM so everyone was going was going to switch to Ubuntu."
Its hard for me to recall because Vista has been soo long in the making.. but I think thats back when they were touting WinFS and 1001 other features that never made it into Vista. I don't remember anyone saying there would be a mass migration to Ubuntu or Linux, but that it would be cost effective hardware resource wise due to these hardware requirements that Vista had been targeting.
"Then you spent March and April crowing about how only eleven copies of Vista were sold."
You clearly missed the issue. MS was touting that it had sold X million of licenses but licences are not copies, and didn't clarify what amount of that was pre-installed OEM that hadn't actually been put in front of a user yet.. get a clue.
"Then it turned out that a ton of Vistas had been sold, at which point things returned to the usual "convicted monopolist" whining."
This has yet to be clarified and even if it is true I believe its hardly relevant of the stability of the company. Their cash-cow after all is their office-suite and collaborative business products.
I'm not going to go any further because you're obviously either some Microsoft Fan-boy or some jackass that only keeps his head half-way out the window of reality.
So does that mean prices will drop soon to compensate for an oversupply? I don't think anyone would complain...
Insert Sig Here
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Vista is not selling.
It's selling 95% as fast as new PC's are. In the PC world, people tend to just use the OS until it's time to scrap the machine. Apple people upgrade OS's every year or so because they have money to burn and Linux people upgrade seeming daily... actually, I don't know why. Vista is being sold on 95% of all new PC's like always. Vista will be just as successful as Windows XP has been.
But are people running out to buy the new OS for no particular reason? No. Why would they?
I don't respond to AC's.
Or, maybe all those fuckwads who were screaming about "Vista requires 4GB of RAM to even run Solitare!!1!" were actually full of shit, and people didn't have to run out and load up?
Nah, that'd be pro-M$ bullshit. I must be a plant, paid by Bill himself to spread these lies!
The obvious reason for lackluster profits must have nothing to do with the market, overproduction, resources, or anything else. It's all Vistas fault.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Linux is easy to set up. I pop in the Ubuntu CD, it boots, I double-click on the setup button, and if I accept the defaults it goes on to install everything. Hell, with the vast majority of systems all your hardware works out of the box which is more than I can say about Windows.
Thank you for your lack of insight into our tribe. Otherwise, you're pretty right about Windows.
SRSLY.
I'm not the type to defend windows, but.....
I don't think it's fair to look at the RAM utilization of an idling box and declare that using x% is bad. What would be the point of the OS not using the RAM that's sitting there? If I were writing an OS and knew I had RAM to spare and was idle, perhaps I'd be pre-loading the most used applications into RAM for faster startup. I think a good OS would almost always be using the RAM available in some way. It saves nothing to let it sit there.
OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.
"Casual Windows users will use any operating system that is loaded on their machine."
And if they upgrade, will try to scrimp by on the existing amount of memory. Most people don't know that they'd probably get a dramtic performance increase for the price of a single stick of RAM.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I wouldn't have expected to see a lot of interest in warmed-over XP systems. If you want the tech in Vista you probably also want the hybrid hard drive, DX10 video, integrated ReadyBoost flash, etc., that is still high-end.
Honestly, I this is why I now recommend Macs to anyone who won't actually enjoy solving the interesting problems Windows throws up, on their own, without endless hours of unpaid tech support from me. I finally sat down, totted up the shocking amount of time I was wasting on other people Microsoft problem and decided that if people aren't willing to spend a few extra bucks for a higher quality machine with better integrated software and a decent service plan, I certainly wasn't going to suffer the consequences.
OTOH, I have no idea if windows RAM utilization is due to the OS being smart of dumb. I simply don't like to see the idea of idle RAM usage propagate as a valid metric of an OS.
I know that part of the "problem" is Vista using large swaths of RAM as a file cache, meaning that just like with Unix people see all that RAM being used and think it's the system but it's just a cache that will be dropped on the floor as soon as an application needs that memory.
The part that bothers me is that this "problem" only started showing up with Vista. Maybe they just changed how the counted 'free' RAM. Or maybe, and this is the worrying part, Vista is the first Microsoft OS with built-in file caching?! I had just assumed that XP had this feature. I mean, I may knock Microsoft, but I also granted NT and progeny "modern OS" status and figured file caching was part of the package.
The enemies of Democracy are
1 gig of RAM is similar under Vista to what 512 megs did under XP. As a result, since most new computers had been getting 1 gig of RAM prior to Vista's release, Vista itself would not be a reason to boost the amount of system memory in new computers.
So, since most people were already at 1 gig on reasonably modern machines, and older machines just didn't have the CPU and GPU power to run Vista well, there hasn't been a real NEED to upgrade. Many of us moved to 2 gigs of memory over a year ago, not for Vista, but for games and other applications.
(Though that is not strictly true. You can divide these up into independent components that could run in parallel on today's processors. On a cluster, you could also drop components that aren't needed on a specific node.)
On a normal system, I see no reason why the OS kernel should take more than a megabyte or two. In a distributed system, you might be able to get away with half that on a minimal node, although the average would probably be in the 1-2 megs region. Anything beyond that would probably function at least as well in userspace.
With the increasing popularity of kernel bypass mechanisms for everything from graphics to networking to disk access, the number of kernel-based drivers needed on a high-performance system is probably much lower than for a cheap, low-end machine. Thus, the kernel size would be reduced accordingly. I'd say you'd be able to cut a quarter of the kernel (code and data) out with sufficient kernel bypassing. On a normal system, then, you'd be looking at 0.75 - 1.5 megs for the kernel. Of course, by doing kernel bypassing, you're implicitly doing some level of offloading, which trims the values down even further.
The next major eaters-of-RAM would be the system libraries (eg: glibc), standard environments (eg: X11) and standard toolkits (eg: OpenGL). Hardware implementations of OpenGL are almost standard, and physical X11 terminals provided hardware implementations of the X11 client-side, which means that most of that is (or could be) built onto the graphics card. Not sure what you could do about glibc, but I'd have thought there'd be a way of putting some of the core, essentially static, code into hardware.
Linux with X will run on 5 megabytes of RAM. Subtract 1 megabyte for the kernel and 1 for user applications, you get 3 for what absolutely has to be in RAM for the software to work. If you can shove a megabyte of this into hardware, this pulls your requirements down to 2 for the system. In practice, almost nothing can actually run at any decent speed on such a system, but we're figuring out what the underlying requirements are, not what the running requirements are.
The system requirements would seem to be 3 megabytes for a running minimal kernel, system libraries and basic GUI. This is your OS, in the modern sense, capable of running anything Linux can run. It's the minimal, fully functional system. Your applications will obviously take vastly more than that, but they can use anything above the basic minimum. Additional libraries, facilities, etc, will also take more memory, but if they're all in userspace and do kernel bypass, they're part of the applications and not part of the OS. They're also going to be faster.
Linux might easily start with 64 processes. Most won't be running at any given time, so you don't need more than a few critical data tables in RAM to be able to swap the process. The typical user is unlikely to be running more than four heavy applications at the same time, and of those, you're very unlikely to have more than two actually alive at a given time. If an active process is given 64 megs to play with, you need 128 megs for active stuff.
All in all, any complete distro (ie: distro software + hardware used) that needs more than 256 megs of RAM for a desktop must be doing something horribly wrong. It is simply not reasonable to use any more than that. Of course, most distros DO need more than that in practice, because machines are not designed to offload or perform kernel bypassing. The CPU does all the heavy lifting, and that's expensive on resources. It's not technically the fault of the software, it's the hardware that is at fault, but really even if the hardware was present, not many software distros can - as yet - take enough advantage of the capabilities to run on a minimal box.
(A lot of the software exists for Linux, it just isn't supplied by anyone or utilized by anything.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
See car analogys can be good, but you have to have magic gnomes to make it work.
I have a hard time selling computers with Vista loaded. Most customers react the same way when playing with Vista; eye rolls, sighs and shoulder shrugs.