Nah, it's just artificial limits. Would totally just work if they flipped a bit in the processor. /s
Less sarcastically, what do people need >64 gigs for on a consumer desktop? I'm a dev and work on a pretty memory intensive service and don't need 128 gigs. Holding an entire double layer blu-ray in memory would only require 50 gigs.
Minecraft. That shit is heavy! On a more serious note, some gamers are using RAM disks to greatly improve performance of some games, especially modded games like Minecraft and Skyrim.
> Less sarcastically, what do people need >64 gigs for on a consumer desktop?
I use mine as a terminal server to some super cheap Raspberry PI machines that are basically just monitors running VNC software.
For good performance you need about 4 to 8GB per user. I don't have that many users personally to need 64GB, but if you have a bunch of kids having terminals is much cheaper than a real computer for each user, plus you only need to keep one computer updated.
You could easily afford a computer in each room that way.
Sure. I don't personally care if Intel's margins drop. But I also don't care if professionals making six figures have to pony up a couple hundred for a Xeon system. The idea that Intel should make casual consumers subsidize professional needs so that professionals can save a hundred bucks is absurd.
Machine learning model training. A large buffer of data waiting to be trained speeds up training. Especially with training on the GPU the biggest bottle neck is reading the data from disk.
The other day, I was struggling to emulate a Hadoop cluster in a series of VMs on a 16G laptop with zero work being performed - just keeping all the services and Cloudera's management scripts and tools made everything swap everywhere.
VMs are my biggest memory hog, particularly when they are running lots and lots of separate Java processes.
The problem with my laptop was that it didn't support >16GB; I'd take more than 64GB if I could have it.
It's usually foolish to say that we don't have need for more X in computing because nothing today warrants more than X; the thing is, if we have more of X, we find uses for it. Most of what we do can trade space for time, or incorporate things in cache hierarchies; and sometimes quantitative change adds up to a qualitative change because new architectural approaches become possible.
If I could have 1TB in my laptop, it would change the way we at my company develop software. In fact we'd rewrite our product to take advantage of that much memory, the case would be overwhelming; we'd introduce a new tier in our architecture for keeping a copy of the customer's working set (typically several GB) in memory. As it is, we rely on the database and its caching; it's OK, but it can't support all the operators we'd like to support.
