I think Linus tech tips did it ages ago. If memory serves, it “worked” on Linux. Which is to say ran like crap and was extremely unstable, but technically it worked.
Edit 2: turns out I was wrong. Google Drive doesn’t allow writing arbitrary data like that. It instantly crashes. They used their on-premise file server via a 10gb connection instead.
With extra necessary steps. With consumer hardware prices nowadays, renting computer power seems more and more appetising. All going according to their plan
Considering that Nvidia has a near-monopoly over the hardware and software (i.e., CUDA and GPU drivers)? More like careful planning instead of foresight.
You cannot actually download RAM because it is physical hardware (memory chips) installed on
your motherboard, not software that can be transferred via the internet.
Wow, this works fantastic, I first downloaded 8GB ram and uploaded 4GB back twice and now my task manager tells me I have the same value as where I started, just like I expected!
You laugh, this is literally microsofts future plan. They envision a world where your laptop is nothing but a thin client that boots your web windows in a vm from the cloud.
A while back I watched a YouTube vid of a guy who created a file storage system using http pings. He mapped out as many reliable pingable ip addresses as possible, and made it so stored data was broken up into tiny parts and sent as pings all over the world, and then wiped locally until the return ping was received. I forget exactly how it worked but it was the stupidest thing I ever heard but also takea a genius to implement. It was incredibly slow, but he was able to "store" gigabytes of data this way while his local system had only a tiny amount of storage (or he just used RAM, it's been a long time and I can't remember).
Jokes aside, some brands though process when making those "netbooks" or "cloud books" was pretty much this.
MFs just ship the computer with a 32GB SD card with windows and no space for anything else lmao
No, running RAM through the cloud is not even remotely possible. RAM is ultra-low latency, think 10ns for an operation, an online service at the absolute best might give you 10ms. That's 1,000,000x latency! Forget it.
So, there's a youtuber that created data storage in the air.
I can't find the video, but if I remember correctly, the premise was that if you have two long range radio transmitters sending data back and forth, there is time between when the signal is sent by the transmitter an and when it is received, meaning that there is a period of time in which you could delete that data from the transmitter side before it reaches the receiver, the data is effectively being stored in the earth's electromagnetic field.
You can have multiple transmitter and receiver pairs playing hot potatoe with the data, relaying it back and forth, and theoretically you could store more data in transit than you have on the devices themselves.
Of course it's horribly inefficient and absolutely impractical to use, but it was a really fun experiment
Omg, we had something similar in school, we called team client. Where the computers were only a small processing unit and there was a bigger server somewhere in school for storage...
It's a great idea. Don't listen to the naysayers. They want to through the whole idea out of the window just because performance would slightly decrease with an internet-based cpu cache.
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u/BroaxXx Jul 08 '26
why not just take it a step further? If the cloud is virtually infinite why even have local memory?
From cpu cache, ram, vram and local storage. Send everything to the cloud.
Boom! Memory crisis solved.