He Continued RAM shortage It’s just one of many reasons to direct creative curses at the rise of generative AI, and while sending RAM prices into the stratosphere pales in comparison to some of the other ills of the giant plagiarizing, planet-burning mental illness machine, it’s still a huge pain in the butt or hip pocket if you need more memory for your computer. So much so, in fact, that the situation has the YouTuber PortalRunner Ask a question that we’re pretty sure didn’t cross anyone’s mind a year or two ago: Can you really run a computer without RAM?
Well, spoiler. While the short answer is “yes,” the long answer is more like “yes, but you’ll wish you hadn’t.” That said, however, PortalRunner video It’s still worth watching, especially because it’s a very detailed introduction to what RAM actually does, why your computer wants as much of it as possible, and why trying to get by without it is basically impractical.
As a warm-up, start by trying to get your computer running with as little RAM as possible. This involves forcing the operating system to use a very large swap file; basically taking data that would otherwise be in RAM and writing or reading it from disk. Your computer already does this when it runs out of RAM, but you try to avoid it as much as possible, for the simple reason that paging is painfully slow, and this approach turns out to be as unsatisfying an experience as one could imagine. So does an ingenious but ultimately doomed effort to replace system RAM with a bunch of VRAM ripped from old graphics cards.
So far, all useless. Both approaches are doomed because their respective media are much slower to access and read than system RAM. But! Modern CPUs also come with super-fast little chunks of memory that are significantly faster than RAM: the CPU cache. So how about just telling the computer to use them and only those?
Well, in theory, yes, you could tell your CPU to never look beyond the cache to meet its memory needs, but by doing so, you’re condemning yourself to working with relatively small amounts of memory. My gaming PC, for example, has a six core chip with three levels of cache: 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, this would total just under 100MB of working memory, a figure that would have seemed impressive to my teenage self, but is unthinkable in 2026.
Still, PortalRunner tries, and it’s actually fascinating to see how running programs in the limited CPU cache space essentially requires going back in time. The challenges you face will be familiar to people whose computing experiences date back to the 1980s: painstaking line-by-line optimization of assembly code, creating rudimentary graphics with ASCII and a limited color palette, etc.
And of course, it’s not very easy to make your computer simply forget that it has RAM installed. PortalRunner does this by tinkering with the motherboard’s basic input/output system (BIOS), but this requires finding a fairly old motherboard; newer models use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) instead of BIOS, and the former is apparently much more difficult to manipulate. After a false start involving a failed attempt to update the BIOS that resulted in a permanently bricked machine, our plucky hero finally settles on a computer from 2009, and after much fiddling and hacking, triumphantly reveals a program that is in fact running entirely in the CPU cache. It’s… it’s… well, okay, it’s Snake.
To be fair, this is a proof of concept, but… I mean, sure, if you have a relatively old motherboard that comes with a proper BIOS chip, along with some assembly knowledge, a very specific set of computing needs, and a solid build, you too could be left out of the Great RAM Rat Race! Otherwise, you’ll have to stay here with the rest of us, cursing yourself for Did not upgrade your RAM last year.
