So much RAM:

- Every pointer is 8 bytes, and a lot of integers are also 8 bytes, and a ton of structs have padding here and there to the 64-bit boundary.

- All graphics are rendered on huge bitmaps which are later composited using advanced hardware, using double or sometimes triple buffering. This allows for nice effects like translucency, shadows, blurring, etc, while requiring simpler logic and producing basically no visual glitches.

- While at it, just one screenful at 4K / 32bop is slightly less that 32 megabytes.

- A bunch of fonts is pre-rasterized for the high resolution (effectively 3x the horizontal resolution for subpixel smoothing), including fancy emoji fonts.

- A ton of services start by default, from system-wide spell-checking to weather and news reporting. The OS's GUI shell strives to be rich and fancy, with nice large previews of images, documents, etc, and also voice output and input.

- But this all is nothing compared to the resource needs of an HTML5 browser.with a couple dozen graphically intense tabs running SPAs like Gmail or Slack, with all the state, and all the JIT'ed JS.

There's plenty to spend RAM on, compared to my fancy Linux desktop from 1999 which happily lived on 64 megabytes of RAM. Opening ten browser tabs was out of question: tabs mostly did not exist yet :)

Thanks. That was one of the topic we touched on discussing Flash [1] a few days ago. GPU has no idea what Vector is. I wonder how much memory could be saved if we could somehow "compute" all 2D fonts and graphics.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34083092

Some amount for sure, but what for? RAM is pretty cheap, and not that scarce anymore.

Back in my 386 days, 4 MB was very tight and I'm sure developers had to be very careful with it.

Today you can have 32 GB for not that much and it's likely that you'll never seriously get into swap.

>Some amount for sure, but what for?

From entry level computing to every appliances. If we want to move baseline memory from 8GB to 16GB, even if it was DDR ( discounting LPDDR price ) that is at least $24 increase in BOM cost, or a total of $48 BOM cost. This is worst for something like Pi or NAS, Router to Smart Appliances where their ASP are much lower. Because of the increase in memory usage, they will either have to rise their price ( which they dont ), let it eat into their margin ( which they wont ), or find $3 BOM cost cutting. Likely coming from SoC.

Gmail works well with mutt and some Google calendar importers into calcurse or ICS tools.

> Would be a better question to ask why does modern OS needs so much RAM.

Because they can.

Resource usage is not a problem from some time.

Crysis (the game) changed the world. It was the first game to run like crap on latest hardware yet it got very positive reviews.

I guess, in the end, people get what they asked for.

> for the same price

Yeah it's kinda ludicrous that 32G of DDR4/5 costs more than the CPU you'd pair it with. Supply chain issues I guess.

I once saw a scanned copy of an invoice for a 1960s mainframe. IIRC, the CPU was about $500,000, the 768kiB of RAM were around $800,000.

I know, that was a long time ago. But there is historical precedent.