512MB was a huge flash drive now it’s not enough ram. Turns out Spotify can’t open-source Car Thing because it’s a potato https://www.androidauthority.com/spotify-car-thing-open-source-3449487/
A raspberry pi zero 2 w ($15) has 512 MB of ram
I paid $1 per MB for a 64MB usb drive. And that seemed alright when I compared it to a floppy disk.
Yeah I remember my uni professor exclaimed “that’s a 128mb usb stick? Holy fuck!” Or the 32mb MMC card for my ngage that could hold a whopping whole 10 songs
It depends on what you are doing. I’ve got single board computers running happily with 512MB of RAM. I certainly wouldn’t want to try and run a GUI on them though.
People have been running GUIs on much less for decades–though if you’re trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there’s tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.
I’d have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.
I used to run a GUI on a Raspberry Pi B+ and it was doable, but that was a decade ago and many programs have gotten a lot more bloated since then. Of course if you are just running your own software, you can optimize it to run with very little RAM.
You can do it easily if you aren’t running full HD or something heavy. Enlightenment runs great on my Pi B and 2 B.
Antix Linux says hi, also remember that gta 5 and Skyrim was running on 512mb shared memory in Xbox 360 and 256+256 vram+ram on ps3
You might not remember that the original Macintosh had 128KB. That’s KB with a K.
Our 90s Mac ran OS 7.6 with 24 MB of ram and a 500MB HD.
Played shareware/warez games pretty well too, even OG Warcraft over 56k dialup direct to my friend’s PC.
Gta 5 was running on 512mb shared ram in ps3 and Xbox 360
512 shared on the 360, 256 dedicated RAM and 256 dedicated VRAM on the PS3.
Yes, see my other comment in this post, I’ve mentioned what you’ve said, however, you should know, ps3 gpu could use both vram and ram but CPU on the other hand didn’t, so it’s kinda shared actually
I wouldn’t call it running well though. Just barely playable on PS3. It was possible to get into a car, drive down a long, straight road and then crash into an invisible building because some cars were faster than the console could load assets.
My Synology NAS has 512 MB of ram. She won’t be winning any races, but she’s a fine beauty. Hits NAS with a wrench
Yeah idk man I had to upgrade mine to the max supported ram (I think 8gb or something) because I run a bunch of services like adguard home and jellyfin on it
Yeah, anything measured in megabyte is “nothing” these days. You’d have to go back quite a bit for 512MB to be considered “huge”.
My efi partition is 512mb. To be on the safe side.
L0 cache be like: few hundred kilobyte, take it or leave it
Tell that to the several 2-core 512mb Debian vms in my hypervisor. They have a purpose and they run perfectly fine!
It sounds like the processor is the real limitation. Plenty of stuff from Windows XP era and before ran in less than 512MB.
If you’re mostly running Mastodon, and other open source platforms and software particularly with no ads, typically the less demand on your hardware. I use to have a 2 gb ram laptop and it surprisingly was able to do a lot once I got Linux installed. I was able to get ps1 emulators running at full frame rate with 2 gb ram. on the default windows 10 install, good luck getting anything like that out of 2 gb of ram.
Usually what affects the hardware performance is what’s running on it. If you stick to 2d sprites, avoid ads and 3D renders, block autoplay gifs and video the better your browsing experience gets. Also block JavaScript.
So it couldn’t just be a web based player for something like PlexAmp? Thats literally all I would want it for. Seems like it could do the job it was made for but for another app would be ideal.
Maybe it could run some HomeAssistant dashboard?
Or show calendar entries/weather for the day.
Anything would be better than landfill.
I suddenly felt so old. My first computer had 8MB RAM… 486 DX2 66MHz
But did it have that sweet, sweet local bus goodness?
Also if it is any consolation, 486DX266 was way after I got my first computer.
You decadent young whippersnappers have no idea.
16kb of RAM, z80 CPU. That’s how we did it in my day.
You don’t know you’re born.
Hah ! I had 256 mathematicians perform very simple calculations, 128 horse riders then relayed the results to 512 stone engravers for storage
You kids don’t know how easy you have it
I bow down to you, greybeard
Tandy model 1 level 2. 2k.
This isn’t a contest, but more a support group.
My first PC was FULL of memory. It had ALL the memory. No amount of money could add more. It had 640KB. It was crazy.
My first computer wasn’t a PC, it had 64KB RAM. I never needed more.
What, you mean 640KB isn’t really enough for everyone?
. . . I kid, I kid. Still, the CarThing strikes me as more of an embedded-type system. 512MB is generous for devices of that class, and more than sufficient for a carefully-tailored Linux kernel + busybox + another 100MB+ of running software. Potato, yes, but potatoes are a useful food source—just not as impressive as filet mignon.
Yup, single purpose servers really don’t need much RAM. If you just need to stream music, you could use a lot less.
I’m pretty sure car thing has 512Mb, not MB.
No, that’s a cope. They just have to include the correct software license text file, like AGPL, when they send us the software.
that’s a cope
A priestly stole? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
And i think you’re a bit behind the times
Yeah, that’s definitely not enough RAM to run any kind of lightweight UI. Especially not an automotive music remote control client 🤔
The 3rd gen Nest Thermostat also has 512MB of RAM, and it isn’t too much of a potato to be a thermostat, complete with animated UI. Author of this article has a severe lack of imagination
