"Windows 95 was 30 MB" is such an ignorant, obnoxious, trite take. a triple buffered framebuffer (which you want for smooth scrolling) for my 4K display is 70 MB in *pixels alone*. Obviously a complete webpage with precomposed textures would take more.https://twitter.com/julienPauli/status/1042113172143067138 …
ideal performance and power usage (which is more important than memory usage for the vast majority of browser users today) is achieved by doing everything on GPU, which precludes this kind of tricks
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when just scrolling, you do not want to touch the DOM or pixels on the CPU at all unless you need to reflow the webpage. you render precomposed textures into the framebuffer, including any desired animation or such, all done on the GPU. Servo does this well, WebKit not so much
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in theory if you had non-interleaved RAM dice and the OS could compact physical memory and manage NVM cache cleverly, using less RAM would actually reduce power consumption by powering off unused RAM, but I think it's not significant enough to spend time getting it to work
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Yeah, an ideal laptop/mobile memory architecture would work like that. With a smart OS, you'd get sleep lifetimes comparable to hibernate, but with instant resume.
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*makes an indefinite gesture* FeRAM
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I thought FeRAM doesn't have the necessary speed or density? However, I don't know if this is inherent or just the case with PZT-based FeRAM. I don't think anybody has commercialized a hafnium-based FeRAM yet though.
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hence "indefinite gesture" :P
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GPU can do decompression. Static power consumption of DRAM refresh for 8x as much RAM as you should need has got to be a bigger overall batt life cost than dynamic consumption under active use...
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as far as I know no existing system actually powers down unused RAM because all accesses are interleaved across every chip
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this is, of course, done because faster RAM access means faster race-to-idle for the CPU cores, which has obvious immediate benefits.
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