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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Garbage collection cost (was Re: Parenthesized syntax challenge)
Message-ID: <hbaker-1810952107490001@10.0.2.15>
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References: <44aa9a$j5h@miso.cs.uq.edu.au> <LUDEMANN.95Oct6140930@expernet26.expernet.com> <DGApp8.J41@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca> <MAD.95Oct13123618@tanzanite.math.keio.ac.jp> <45ksdk$7gr@jive.cs.utexas.edu> <DGJp8o.7nF@Cadence.COM> <MAD.95Oct18040436@tanzanite.math.keio.ac.jp> <hbaker-1710952127200001@10.0.2.15> <4635ap$8no@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 1995 05:07:49 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:5484 comp.lang.lisp:19597 comp.lang.java:2095

In article <4635ap$8no@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu>, roc+@cs.cmu.edu (Robert
O'Callahan) wrote:

> hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) wrote:
> 
> >* I disagree with Hans that people will want to keep their mark(copy)/alloc
> >ratios high enough to keep the total memory to some some integer times the
> >live data.  Memory is becoming cheaper faster than processors are becoming
> >faster,
> 
> I don't believe this.  The doubling time for processors speeds is
> definitely less than two years.  Memory costs hardly seem to be coming
> down at all.

Thanks to everyone who pointed this out to me.  Perhaps I'm looking at this
with a much longer time scale -- 35 years or so.  I'm also using the intuition
that cycle time is linearly related to feature size, while memory space is
quadratically related to feature size.  Unfortunately, this intuition doesn't
consider things like the strength of the dollar, the budgeting cycles of
major DRAM vendors, etc.  Also, the ability of Microsoft to waste memory
so prodigiously has really raised the demand curve.  (I understand that
'Bob' was going to require a minimum of 32 Mbytes.  Whatever happened to
'Bob', anyway?  Perhaps he succumbed to hype blood pressure...)

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