Writing

If the history of DRAM were a drama series, every increase in capacity would be stalked by that monster of complexity, speed. Up until, say, the 80s, RAM was sufficiently slow that it could be characterised by a couple of numbers. Now, though, it's fast enough that physical limits, such as the speed of light, are an important part of the design process. At the speeds that DRAM operates nowadays, the wires representing the connection between DRAM and its controller behave less like an instantaneous transport of signal and more like a series of crowded parallel shipping lanes, where individual bits move leisurely to their destination, some arriving sooner than others, interfering with their neighbors, and bouncing off the dock.