The persistent lack of RAM It’s one of the many reasons to channel creative curses at the rise of generative AI – and while sending RAM prices into the stratosphere, massive plagiarism pales in comparison to some of the other evils of the planet-burning mental illness machine, it’s still a huge pain in the ass/hip pocket if you need more memory for your computer. So much so, in fact, that the situation is YouTuber PortalRunner Asking a question we’re sure no one thought of a year or two ago: Can you really run a computer without RAM?
Okay, spoiler. While the short answer is “yes,” the long answer is more like “yes, but you wouldn’t want to.” However, PortalRunner’s video it’s still worth watching, not least because it goes into great detail about what RAM actually does, why your computer wants as much of it as possible, and why you should try to run without it.
As a warm-up, he tries to run his computer with as little RAM as possible. This involves forcing the operating system to use a very large swap file – basically taking data that might be in RAM and writing/reading it to disk instead. It already does this when your computer runs out of RAM, but it tries not to do this as much as possible, for the simple reason that paging is very slow, and this approach proves to be an unsatisfying experience as one might imagine. So is the ingenious but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to replace the system’s RAM with a bunch of VRAM scavenged from ancient graphics cards.
So far, so pointless. Both of these approaches suffer from the fact that the corresponding environment is slower to access and read than the system RAM memory. But! Modern CPUs also come with some super-fast bits of memory that are significantly smaller faster More than RAM: CPU cache. But what about telling the computer to use these things and them alone?
Well, in theory, yes, you can actually tell your CPU to never look beyond the cache for memory needs, but you’re still condemning yourself to working with a relatively small amount of memory. For example, I have one on my gaming PC six-core chip with three cache levels: Level 1 (the fastest) has 64 KB per core, Level 2 has 512 KB per core, and Level 3 has 16 MB per core. Without RAM, that would make it just under 100MB of RAM, which would have seemed impressive to my teenage self, but would be unthinkable in 2026.
Still, PortalRunner goes for it, and it’s really interesting to see how applications running on limited CPU cache space essentially require stepping back in time. The challenges he faced will be familiar to those whose computing experience dates back to the 1980s: painstaking line-by-line optimization of assembly code, creating rudimentary graphics with ASCII and a limited color palette, and so on.
And of course, it’s not so simple to make your computer forget that you have any RAM installed. PortalRunner does this by messing with the motherboard’s basic input/output system (BIOS), but this requires finding a fairly old motherboard – newer models use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) rather than BIOS, and the former is more difficult to work with. After a false start involving a failed attempt to flash the BIOS resulting in a permanently bricked machine, our intrepid hero finally settled on a computer from 2009 and after much tinkering and hacking, triumphantly delivered a program that actually ran entirely in CPU cache. It’s… it’s… well, okay, Snake.
To be fair, it’s a proof of concept, but… I mean, if you have a relatively old motherboard, equipped with a suitable BIOS chip, some assembly know-how, a very specific set of computing needs, and a powerful constitution, you too can knock yourself out of the Big RAM Rat Race! Otherwise, you’ll have to stay here with us, damn yourself you haven’t upgraded your RAM in the last year.
