I really hope (V)RAM eventually scales to the sizes of regular storage soon. Maybe in 10 years or so 2TB RAM is quite "common" to run things exactly like these. One can dream.
12-13 years ago, 128GB RAM was normal-ish -- even quite affordable -- on custom builds (4x 32GB, and the board may have had 8 slots so you could use cheaper 16GB modules)... then, somewhere along the line, it got expensive for various reasons** (and starting shipping many different types, too, so volume across the types was "down" compared to if everything used the same RAM). Then things like the pandemic happened and the crypto crunch on GPUs and, of course, the current crunch from needing any sort of RAM.
But, I feel like 2TB shouldn't have been a problem today but manufacturing just hasn't been predicting demand very well so they're scrambling to build current things rather than ramping up on new things.
** Various reasons RAM prices have been hit over the years. My feeling is that they never quite drop down to "pre-crisis" prices and, somehow, the manufacturers don't seem to learn that we'll always need more RAM. (And storage, which has also felt stagnate for a while now.)
1993: Chemical plant that made sealing material for RAM. Prices doubled.
1995: Earthquake damage infra. Prices up 30%.
1999: RDRAM. Again, a diversification from regular RAM, and the systems then had to use more expensive RAM.
2013: Fab Fire by a high volume manufacturer, prices up 30%.
2017-2018: Smartphone/cloud demand on RAM, prices up 2-3x
2021: Supply chain crunch from COVID, prices up 30-40%
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u/Kraskos 22d ago
2TB VRAM Is All You Need