7 ms·

64gb workstation ought to be enough for anybody. Jokes aside, what do you do if you are interested in >64gb workstations?

c2h5oh 10y ago
Some examples that can easily push you beyond 64 GB: - high resolution photo editing: when you start with a 80 mpix / 48 bit photo from a medium format camera pushing beyond 16 GB requires only a couple layers and a couple undo steps being available - high resolution video processing. 1 second of uncompressed 4k 60fps video is almost 1.4GB - very large application compilation: building Android requires 16GB of RAM/swap - I'm sure there are apps that push that requirement even further - development environment for a complex system that requires you to run dozens of VMs if you want all components running locally (I've had to run 2 VMs with 12GB requirements each once)
- mozumder 10y ago
  If you can afford a $30,000 medium format camera, you can afford the Xeon workstation it usually needs. The kind of person that work with those systems would pay $6,000 for an umbrella that doesn't even have any electronics in it: https://www.adorama.com/bcb3355203.html?gclid=CLKvmd2erNICFYWEswodIDUCJQ https://www.adorama.com/bcb3355203.html?gclid=CLKvmd2erNICFY... Absolutely no one that owns one of these professional cameras uses them with non-Xeon CPUs. Really the only use for greater than 64Gb for non-Xeon CPUs would be student animation or machine-learning projects.
  - Retric 10y ago
    It's 25 pounds so not really an umbrella. It's like calling Xeon's just sand.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Just because someone can afford to rent a $30,000 camera doesn't necessarily mean they have unlimited cash to burn on other things.
    - arjie 10y ago
      Rent an Azure G5 and remote in perhaps?
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      No, but the difference between i7 and Xeon is significantly less than what you'd have to pay for that extra RAM. We're talking O($100).
      - pvg 10y ago
        So O($1)?
    - dpark 10y ago
      It's about $2000/week to rent an IQ180. If you can afford the rental price, you can afford a computer to process the images.
      - mcbits 10y ago
        That still doesn't follow. Having a certain amount of money doesn't imply that you have even more money, nor that you want to spend more than is truly necessary.
        haikuginger 10y ago
        Diminishing returns on increasingly exponentially-priced cameras means that if you're paying for the very top tier, value is no longer a consideration. Your average flagship smartphone camera is a Toyota Camry. It gets the job done. Upgrade to a high-end bridge camera or entry-level DSLR (phones have killed the bargain point-and-shoot market), and you're looking at something like a basic 328i; already more car than most people will ever need. Upgrading to the top end of the 35mm DSLR market is a bit like an AMG Mercedes; no one is going to make eyes at it unless they're looking for it, but it can competently handle pretty much any situation that you might normally encounter. Going to medium format is like buying a supercar. Yes, it is better than every other option, but it's also an exercise in vanity- you don't buy a supercar because you need to accelerate the way a supercar does on a regular basis, but because there might be a situation where you need one, maybe two, of its advantages over the Mercedes. So where does that leave the IQ180? It's a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse- a $2M exercise in masturbation that can only be used to its full capacity if you're willing to pay $42,000 for a set of tires that will burn through after 10 minutes at top speed. No one buying a Veyron will hesitate to pay for the tires, because if you're buying a Veyron, there's no cost/benefit analysis that would keep you from it. No one buying an IQ180 will shy away from a computer to take advantage of its capabilities.
  - c2h5oh 10y ago
    While still true it might not be for long: "advanced amateur" small formal SLRs with 36mpix @42bpp now start below $2000 and 24mpix @36bpp in the lower part of $500-1000 bracket. https://www.adorama.com/ipxk1.html https://www.adorama.com/ipxk1.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd810.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd810.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd7100.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd7100.html Which brings a slightly unrelated note: people seem to be blissfully unaware that you need less than 9mpix for a 12x9" 300 dpi print or that the zoom lens they bought with the camera has sharpness that effectively limits the resolution to 5-10, maybe 12 mpix if they are lucky. But megapixel count is easy to sell -> race for more megapixels -> smaller physical pixels -> more signal amplification needed -> more noise / general lower photo quality.
    - mozumder 10y ago
      I used to shoot 33megapixel medium format cameras 10 years ago, on 8GB machines with 1GB GPUs just fine, doing multilayer photoshop on 48-bits-per-pixel TIFFs. 64Gb is completely unnecessary for photography. Photographers don't even go over 16GB.
- dpark 10y ago
  What camera is capturing 16GB photos? An IQ180 captures 80 megapixels but the images are something like 500 MB each. All of your hypothetical examples are also for very niche high-resource usage professionals. It's absurd that these cases need extremely high memory support from consumer processors. Intel is not obligated to subsidize anyone, especially not people who can afford to pay for high end systems.
  - tertius 10y ago
    I think he meant 16GB memory used when editing. Not the filesize.
    - dpark 10y ago
      Same question still applies.
      - philipkglass 10y ago
        You asked in another sub-thread "what do people need >64 gigs for on a consumer desktop?" but jeff_vader started this sub-thread asking "what do you do if you are interested in >64gb workstations?" AFAICT nobody on this sub-thread is claiming that consumer desktops should cater to our niche use cases. We're just offering examples of application domains where a high RAM-to-CPU ratio is useful.
        dpark 10y ago
        You're right. I was following up on the "I absolutely hate how they cap maximum RAM on consumer machines" comment further up the chain but jeff_vader's question pivoted the conversation and I missed the memo. There are definitely cases where professionals need (or can greatly benefit from) >64GB workstations and I don't dispute that.
      - brennebeck 10y ago
        Not really. As the actual editing being added to the base image is what could push that. I think the question you'd be looking for is, "what amount of photo editing, effects, etc. would make the editing process of a 80mpix photo consume >16GB memory?" Additionally, as for your original question: For hobby or even 'normal' professional photography, I'd guess none. But rigs like the ones used for Gmaps Street View, the recent CNN gigapixel, etc. would probably have the capability to approach that size.
- skartik 10y ago
  I am a FEA Consultant and work with Abaqus and LS-Dyna. I need >64 GB now.
nextos 10y ago
Genomics. E.g. building a genome index of k-mers (n-grams) usually requires more than 64 GB. It can be quickly done on a consumer workstation, but you do need 128 GB in many scenarios.
- dpark 10y ago
  Who is doing this and can't afford a Xeon system? And why should Intel and AMD be making everyone else pay more so that these people can pay a little less?
  - phamilton 10y ago
    Grad students :). More specifically, a professor with a research grant can afford to fund N grad students where N is inversely proportional to equipment cost. The complaint is not about adding the capability to all chips. It's about smoothing out the step function between consumer machines and professional workstations.
    - dpark 10y ago
      The steps from consumer to professional seem pretty smooth. The higher end consumer machines cost more than the lower and professional machines. You can buy SkyLake Xeon processors from Newegg for as low as a couple hundred dollars.
emersonrsantos 10y ago
I use a sound sampler (Hauptwerk) that loads tens of thousand of wavefiles and needs a polyphony (simultaneous samples being played) of thousands of voices to simulate a pipe organ. The minimum configuration for the smallest instrument (one voice) with natural acoustics (ie. original ambient reveberation recorded) is 4gb. The normal requirements for some good instruments are 64-128gb for 24-bit 6-channel uncompressed audio.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  > 24-bit (...) uncompressed audio Do you really need this much headroom, e.g. for producing music professionally? (If so, why are you arguing over the $50-100 extra for a Xeon?) Because for listening, it's proven fact that even professional musicians and mixing engineers using equipment costing >$100k can't tell 24 bit from 16 bit in a proper double-blind A/B test. Presumably you use a high sample rate as well (maybe 192 kHz), which is equally useless. Drop both of those, and you're within 64GB easily with no noticable SQ loss.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    For editing, you want to use the highest possible starting bandwidth (sampling rate * bit width) because every intermediate edit and calculation leads to round-off and other errors. You also need them to be WAVs or some other raw format since you cause minor errors every time you compress + decompress something, not to mention the performance loss. It's the same rationale for doing calculations in full 80-bit or 64-bit FP even if you don't need the full bits of precision -- if you start your calculations at your target precision, your result will have insufficient precision due to truncation, roundoff, overflow, underflow, clipping, etc. in intermediate calculations. In theory, if you knew what your editing pipeline is, one could mathematically derive the starting headroom required to end up with acceptable error, but in practice that's probably a very risky proposition because 1) you don't know every intermediate calculation going on in every piece of software and 2) errors grow in highly non-linear ways, so even a small change in your pipeline might cause a large change in required headroom [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis#Generation_and_propagation_of_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis#Generation_...
philipkglass 10y ago
Quantum chemistry. There are a number of high accuracy wavefunction based methods that are compute-tractable on desktop machines but very demanding of storage. Even when there's a disk based alternative to RAM storage it's a lot slower when you can't just allocate huge arrays in memory. I could easily use 256 GB, maybe 512, on a machine with 8 physical cores. You can get commercial software that is a bit better tuned for running on "ordinary" desktop hardware, but it's so expensive that you don't really come out ahead on total cost.
- hengheng 10y ago
  Honestly that application sounds like you should be able to just get that 512G machine. Buffered ECC DDR4 RAM has gotten cheaper over the last year too.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    If I still did research full time I'd probably get a Xeon workstation loaded with RAM for home. But it's just a hobby for me now that my day job is writing non-scientific software, so it doesn't seem like a justifiable expense. Might go up from my current 4 cores and 32 GB to something Zen-based later this year. (Tangentially: I wouldn't bother with ECC RAM for this application unless that were required by the rest of the hardware. Memory errors may slightly affect time to a converged solution, but it's rare that a flipped bit would actually cause a job to converge to a different solution.)
    - boulos 10y ago
      If this is just a hobby why not rent a large VM from us (GCE) or AWS? It sounds like you don't run enough to want a box for anything like 24x7, but that it'd be great to have tons of memory and lots of cores (or a giant SSD). We just announced our Skylakes yesterday ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud,
      - lqdc13 10y ago
        I work on NLP projects and have similar issue with memory. The reason I don't use cloud computing is that you constantly have to worry about moving data around, turning stuff on and off, API changes, data movement costs, product lineup changes (should I store this stuff on S3 or local HD), locally compiling all your stuff again or containerization and associated time overhead. Local large box makes way more sense if you're doing solo projects. And if traveling, it would way more sense to rent a VPS from Hetzner. Flat cost structure and tons of bang for the buck. BTW, I you can get 128 gb LGA2011-v3 motherboards. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157543 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681315... and it seems like it works: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938855/hardcore-hardware-we-stuffed-this-pc-with-128gb-of-cutting-edge-ddr4-ram.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938855/hardcore-hardware-we-... even though the spec says max 64gb: https://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Pro...
redtuesday 10y ago
Maybe to play around with genome data? http://i.imgur.com/UYqaVoD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UYqaVoD.jpg

c2h5oh 10y ago

Some examples that can easily push you beyond 64 GB: - high resolution photo editing: when you start with a 80 mpix / 48 bit photo from a medium format camera pushing beyond 16 GB requires only a couple layers and a couple undo steps being available - high resolution video processing. 1 second of uncompressed 4k 60fps video is almost 1.4GB - very large application compilation: building Android requires 16GB of RAM/swap - I'm sure there are apps that push that requirement even further - development environment for a complex system that requires you to run dozens of VMs if you want all components running locally (I've had to run 2 VMs with 12GB requirements each once)

mozumder 10y ago
If you can afford a $30,000 medium format camera, you can afford the Xeon workstation it usually needs. The kind of person that work with those systems would pay $6,000 for an umbrella that doesn't even have any electronics in it: https://www.adorama.com/bcb3355203.html?gclid=CLKvmd2erNICFYWEswodIDUCJQ https://www.adorama.com/bcb3355203.html?gclid=CLKvmd2erNICFY... Absolutely no one that owns one of these professional cameras uses them with non-Xeon CPUs. Really the only use for greater than 64Gb for non-Xeon CPUs would be student animation or machine-learning projects.
- Retric 10y ago
  It's 25 pounds so not really an umbrella. It's like calling Xeon's just sand.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Just because someone can afford to rent a $30,000 camera doesn't necessarily mean they have unlimited cash to burn on other things.
  - arjie 10y ago
    Rent an Azure G5 and remote in perhaps?
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    No, but the difference between i7 and Xeon is significantly less than what you'd have to pay for that extra RAM. We're talking O($100).
    - pvg 10y ago
      So O($1)?
  - dpark 10y ago
    It's about $2000/week to rent an IQ180. If you can afford the rental price, you can afford a computer to process the images.
    - mcbits 10y ago
      That still doesn't follow. Having a certain amount of money doesn't imply that you have even more money, nor that you want to spend more than is truly necessary.
      - haikuginger 10y ago
        Diminishing returns on increasingly exponentially-priced cameras means that if you're paying for the very top tier, value is no longer a consideration. Your average flagship smartphone camera is a Toyota Camry. It gets the job done. Upgrade to a high-end bridge camera or entry-level DSLR (phones have killed the bargain point-and-shoot market), and you're looking at something like a basic 328i; already more car than most people will ever need. Upgrading to the top end of the 35mm DSLR market is a bit like an AMG Mercedes; no one is going to make eyes at it unless they're looking for it, but it can competently handle pretty much any situation that you might normally encounter. Going to medium format is like buying a supercar. Yes, it is better than every other option, but it's also an exercise in vanity- you don't buy a supercar because you need to accelerate the way a supercar does on a regular basis, but because there might be a situation where you need one, maybe two, of its advantages over the Mercedes. So where does that leave the IQ180? It's a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse- a $2M exercise in masturbation that can only be used to its full capacity if you're willing to pay $42,000 for a set of tires that will burn through after 10 minutes at top speed. No one buying a Veyron will hesitate to pay for the tires, because if you're buying a Veyron, there's no cost/benefit analysis that would keep you from it. No one buying an IQ180 will shy away from a computer to take advantage of its capabilities.
- c2h5oh 10y ago
  While still true it might not be for long: "advanced amateur" small formal SLRs with 36mpix @42bpp now start below $2000 and 24mpix @36bpp in the lower part of $500-1000 bracket. https://www.adorama.com/ipxk1.html https://www.adorama.com/ipxk1.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd810.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd810.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd7100.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd7100.html Which brings a slightly unrelated note: people seem to be blissfully unaware that you need less than 9mpix for a 12x9" 300 dpi print or that the zoom lens they bought with the camera has sharpness that effectively limits the resolution to 5-10, maybe 12 mpix if they are lucky. But megapixel count is easy to sell -> race for more megapixels -> smaller physical pixels -> more signal amplification needed -> more noise / general lower photo quality.
  - mozumder 10y ago
    I used to shoot 33megapixel medium format cameras 10 years ago, on 8GB machines with 1GB GPUs just fine, doing multilayer photoshop on 48-bits-per-pixel TIFFs. 64Gb is completely unnecessary for photography. Photographers don't even go over 16GB.
dpark 10y ago
What camera is capturing 16GB photos? An IQ180 captures 80 megapixels but the images are something like 500 MB each. All of your hypothetical examples are also for very niche high-resource usage professionals. It's absurd that these cases need extremely high memory support from consumer processors. Intel is not obligated to subsidize anyone, especially not people who can afford to pay for high end systems.
- tertius 10y ago
  I think he meant 16GB memory used when editing. Not the filesize.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Same question still applies.
    - philipkglass 10y ago
      You asked in another sub-thread "what do people need >64 gigs for on a consumer desktop?" but jeff_vader started this sub-thread asking "what do you do if you are interested in >64gb workstations?" AFAICT nobody on this sub-thread is claiming that consumer desktops should cater to our niche use cases. We're just offering examples of application domains where a high RAM-to-CPU ratio is useful.
      - dpark 10y ago
        You're right. I was following up on the "I absolutely hate how they cap maximum RAM on consumer machines" comment further up the chain but jeff_vader's question pivoted the conversation and I missed the memo. There are definitely cases where professionals need (or can greatly benefit from) >64GB workstations and I don't dispute that.
    - brennebeck 10y ago
      Not really. As the actual editing being added to the base image is what could push that. I think the question you'd be looking for is, "what amount of photo editing, effects, etc. would make the editing process of a 80mpix photo consume >16GB memory?" Additionally, as for your original question: For hobby or even 'normal' professional photography, I'd guess none. But rigs like the ones used for Gmaps Street View, the recent CNN gigapixel, etc. would probably have the capability to approach that size.
skartik 10y ago
I am a FEA Consultant and work with Abaqus and LS-Dyna. I need >64 GB now.

nextos 10y ago

Genomics. E.g. building a genome index of k-mers (n-grams) usually requires more than 64 GB. It can be quickly done on a consumer workstation, but you do need 128 GB in many scenarios.

dpark 10y ago
Who is doing this and can't afford a Xeon system? And why should Intel and AMD be making everyone else pay more so that these people can pay a little less?
- phamilton 10y ago
  Grad students :). More specifically, a professor with a research grant can afford to fund N grad students where N is inversely proportional to equipment cost. The complaint is not about adding the capability to all chips. It's about smoothing out the step function between consumer machines and professional workstations.
  - dpark 10y ago
    The steps from consumer to professional seem pretty smooth. The higher end consumer machines cost more than the lower and professional machines. You can buy SkyLake Xeon processors from Newegg for as low as a couple hundred dollars.

emersonrsantos 10y ago

I use a sound sampler (Hauptwerk) that loads tens of thousand of wavefiles and needs a polyphony (simultaneous samples being played) of thousands of voices to simulate a pipe organ. The minimum configuration for the smallest instrument (one voice) with natural acoustics (ie. original ambient reveberation recorded) is 4gb. The normal requirements for some good instruments are 64-128gb for 24-bit 6-channel uncompressed audio.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
> 24-bit (...) uncompressed audio Do you really need this much headroom, e.g. for producing music professionally? (If so, why are you arguing over the $50-100 extra for a Xeon?) Because for listening, it's proven fact that even professional musicians and mixing engineers using equipment costing >$100k can't tell 24 bit from 16 bit in a proper double-blind A/B test. Presumably you use a high sample rate as well (maybe 192 kHz), which is equally useless. Drop both of those, and you're within 64GB easily with no noticable SQ loss.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  For editing, you want to use the highest possible starting bandwidth (sampling rate * bit width) because every intermediate edit and calculation leads to round-off and other errors. You also need them to be WAVs or some other raw format since you cause minor errors every time you compress + decompress something, not to mention the performance loss. It's the same rationale for doing calculations in full 80-bit or 64-bit FP even if you don't need the full bits of precision -- if you start your calculations at your target precision, your result will have insufficient precision due to truncation, roundoff, overflow, underflow, clipping, etc. in intermediate calculations. In theory, if you knew what your editing pipeline is, one could mathematically derive the starting headroom required to end up with acceptable error, but in practice that's probably a very risky proposition because 1) you don't know every intermediate calculation going on in every piece of software and 2) errors grow in highly non-linear ways, so even a small change in your pipeline might cause a large change in required headroom [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis#Generation_and_propagation_of_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis#Generation_...

philipkglass 10y ago

Quantum chemistry. There are a number of high accuracy wavefunction based methods that are compute-tractable on desktop machines but very demanding of storage. Even when there's a disk based alternative to RAM storage it's a lot slower when you can't just allocate huge arrays in memory. I could easily use 256 GB, maybe 512, on a machine with 8 physical cores. You can get commercial software that is a bit better tuned for running on "ordinary" desktop hardware, but it's so expensive that you don't really come out ahead on total cost.

hengheng 10y ago
Honestly that application sounds like you should be able to just get that 512G machine. Buffered ECC DDR4 RAM has gotten cheaper over the last year too.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  If I still did research full time I'd probably get a Xeon workstation loaded with RAM for home. But it's just a hobby for me now that my day job is writing non-scientific software, so it doesn't seem like a justifiable expense. Might go up from my current 4 cores and 32 GB to something Zen-based later this year. (Tangentially: I wouldn't bother with ECC RAM for this application unless that were required by the rest of the hardware. Memory errors may slightly affect time to a converged solution, but it's rare that a flipped bit would actually cause a job to converge to a different solution.)
  - boulos 10y ago
    If this is just a hobby why not rent a large VM from us (GCE) or AWS? It sounds like you don't run enough to want a box for anything like 24x7, but that it'd be great to have tons of memory and lots of cores (or a giant SSD). We just announced our Skylakes yesterday ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud,
    - lqdc13 10y ago
      I work on NLP projects and have similar issue with memory. The reason I don't use cloud computing is that you constantly have to worry about moving data around, turning stuff on and off, API changes, data movement costs, product lineup changes (should I store this stuff on S3 or local HD), locally compiling all your stuff again or containerization and associated time overhead. Local large box makes way more sense if you're doing solo projects. And if traveling, it would way more sense to rent a VPS from Hetzner. Flat cost structure and tons of bang for the buck. BTW, I you can get 128 gb LGA2011-v3 motherboards. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157543 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681315... and it seems like it works: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938855/hardcore-hardware-we-stuffed-this-pc-with-128gb-of-cutting-edge-ddr4-ram.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938855/hardcore-hardware-we-... even though the spec says max 64gb: https://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Pro...

redtuesday 10y ago

Maybe to play around with genome data? http://i.imgur.com/UYqaVoD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UYqaVoD.jpg