I know it stands for Video Random Access Memory, but I cant comprehend or visualize what that means. If you can, give me some visual descriptions to help me wrap my head around it.
Thanks!
In: 24
Nobody here has broken it down like you’re 5 yet, so I’ll try to give you a very rudimentary explanation of what RAM does. Regular old RAM, or VRAM, it doesn’t matter.
So take a piece of notebook paper and write down information on it. Now take another and do the same. Continue this exercise until you have hundreds, or even thousands, of sheets of information. That’s a lot of information, and you can’t look at all of it at one time.
RAM is, at a very basic level, how many of those pages you can retrieve information from (by looking at them) at a time. Imagine it as a desk that you can spread the pages out on. More RAM means a bigger desk, and an easier time finding information. Likewise, if you have very little RAM, or a very small desk, you can’t see very many pages at once. So, the more RAM you have, the quicker it is to locate and process information. Having very little RAM makes things slow, as it takes time to sort through your pages, find the ones you need, and place them on the desk.
Oddly, this is a lot like how your brain works.
Rhetorical question: What’s your address?
That information is stored in the Hard Drive that is your mind, but you have to retrieve that information by “finding that page”, as it were. You weren’t thinking of it when I asked, but it was very little trouble for your RAM, or your conscious thought, to go get that little piece of common information. You can, and absolutely do, reach the limits of your mind’s RAM. Just think back to all of those tests in school, to the answer that you knew you had, but just couldn’t retrieve. As soon as you see the answer you say, “Oh, yeah!”, but you couldn’t find that page at the time. You needed to find and look at information that was stored in all of those pages that we make simply living our every day lives, and you couldn’t.
So you want a big desk for your GPU, and a big desk for your CPU, so that your computer is fast. One day in the future, we may also be able to expand our mind’s RAM through the use of hardware implants, coexistent AIs, or who knows what else. We might one day be able to retrieve any piece of information we’ve ever recorded. From what it feels like to be in the womb, to our first kiss, or even to review our entire lives in the moments right before our death. It’s really neat, and a bit scary, to think about.
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