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Yes I'm saying it's not enough. It's the same RAM that was available 4 years ago on Macbook Pro (and still not available any higher on MBP either). It's common

Yes I'm saying it's not enough. It's the same RAM that was available 4 years ago on Macbook Pro (and still not available any higher on MBP either). It's common to run several types of server in production, these all need to be run on localhost for development purposes. Also virtual environments so server architecture can easily be scripted. 16GB works for me, but is far from ideal. I was hoping MS would one-up Apple here, but not yet.

odonnellryan 9y ago
I agree. I don't do anything crazy, but I consider 16gb the "starting point."
rsynnott 9y ago
To go over 16GB right now on Intel mobile chips you need to sacrifice battery life (going from LPDDR3 to plain ol' DDR3 or 4). This will be resolved with Cannon Lake/Coffee Lake, but until then don't expect to see many ultra-thin form factor computers with >16GB.
- Joeri 9y ago
  I have a lenovo t460p which has 32 gb of this supposedly power hungry RAM and it can make it through a workday on a charge just fine. From what I can tell, the power needs of non-LP RAM are overstated. AFAIK, the reason ultrabooks have LPDDR3 is because it is very low profile when soldered. If thin is your thing, you want LPDDR3. My t460p has a smaller footprint than a MBP, but it is as thick as a whole stack of them.
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    That has a 72Wh battery; the Surface Pro 4 has a 40Wh battery, and this is presumably similar. So it's a pretty big difference. The difference between LPDDR3 and DDR3 isn't dramatic in actual operation; LPDDR3 uses about 70% of the power of DDR3. It becomes a bigger deal when the machine is in standby, however; LPDDR3 uses 10% the power of DDR3. This would be a big deal for Apple, which also insists on using LPDDR3, and has historically sold machines with standby times measured in weeks or months. Not sure if people have particular expectations of standby times from Surface Pros, but if they're used like tablets you'd want it to be decent. Keeping the memory powered is nearly the only power used when a computer's in standby, so 10x the power usage would be a huge deal.
    - Joeri 9y ago
      I have had several windows laptops with lpddr3, and the standby battery life was never that great. Windows just isn't good at managing battery in standby. I think only apple can bring up the power argument for choosing lpddr3 because it only makes a real difference in their case.
      - rsynnott 9y ago
        Never really used a modern Windows laptop; I remember the whole power management situation being a complete nightmare in 2001 or so, but would have assumed it'd been sorted out by now...
wooter 9y ago
Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc.. Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM. Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go. If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take? For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.
- mmahemoff 9y ago
  I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data. ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards) And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc. I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
  - wooter 9y ago
    Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that. Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.

odonnellryan 9y ago

I agree. I don't do anything crazy, but I consider 16gb the "starting point."

rsynnott 9y ago

To go over 16GB right now on Intel mobile chips you need to sacrifice battery life (going from LPDDR3 to plain ol' DDR3 or 4). This will be resolved with Cannon Lake/Coffee Lake, but until then don't expect to see many ultra-thin form factor computers with >16GB.

Joeri 9y ago
I have a lenovo t460p which has 32 gb of this supposedly power hungry RAM and it can make it through a workday on a charge just fine. From what I can tell, the power needs of non-LP RAM are overstated. AFAIK, the reason ultrabooks have LPDDR3 is because it is very low profile when soldered. If thin is your thing, you want LPDDR3. My t460p has a smaller footprint than a MBP, but it is as thick as a whole stack of them.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  That has a 72Wh battery; the Surface Pro 4 has a 40Wh battery, and this is presumably similar. So it's a pretty big difference. The difference between LPDDR3 and DDR3 isn't dramatic in actual operation; LPDDR3 uses about 70% of the power of DDR3. It becomes a bigger deal when the machine is in standby, however; LPDDR3 uses 10% the power of DDR3. This would be a big deal for Apple, which also insists on using LPDDR3, and has historically sold machines with standby times measured in weeks or months. Not sure if people have particular expectations of standby times from Surface Pros, but if they're used like tablets you'd want it to be decent. Keeping the memory powered is nearly the only power used when a computer's in standby, so 10x the power usage would be a huge deal.
  - Joeri 9y ago
    I have had several windows laptops with lpddr3, and the standby battery life was never that great. Windows just isn't good at managing battery in standby. I think only apple can bring up the power argument for choosing lpddr3 because it only makes a real difference in their case.
    - rsynnott 9y ago
      Never really used a modern Windows laptop; I remember the whole power management situation being a complete nightmare in 2001 or so, but would have assumed it'd been sorted out by now...

wooter 9y ago

Counter-example: I worked in ML research at one of the largest companies in the field (in the billions of predictions per day) and 16GB was more than enough to do anything I would ever do on a laptop/tablet/etc.. Furthermore, I found that solutions which couldn't be successfully worked on with <16GB RAM were basically architecturally unsound. Not being able to scale the workload on demand or control peak demand. Extra RAM just hid poor developers from their non-scalable solutions - or just increased their downtime till they got an OUT OF MEM error. The issues were only exacerbated at scale - failing even with 128+ GB in RAM. Basically, when the difference between a dev sample and a prod sample is 3+ orders of magnitude, your ability to scale the process up/down, fail gracefully, even battery life, etc. are far more important than having large swathes of memory to fail on. Especially on the go. If you do deal with production (big) data, you're ssh'ed in to some always-on, process-maintained hardware if only for the sake of latency and interruptions. And you better have the toolset to do it. How much memory does a terminal take? For graphics, I understand - but then you're definitely not working on a surface pro or on the go at all really.

mmahemoff 9y ago
I'm not crunching big data in development or doing much with graphics (other than occasional faffing on some image editor). What I'm running is a lot of local servers. Each server has overhead even if you are only storing one byte of data. ie I'm running Rails, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Nginx, Memcached, and in some cases, multiple instances (dev, test, and multiple shards) And then the usual OS requirements - Vim, 250 browser tabs, Slack, Hangouts, etc. I'm sure there are all manner of optimisations and assumptions that could cut things down, but I'd rather the big manufacturers upgrade their RAM capacity every few years so I can focus on a dev environment that's a good approximation for prod.
- wooter 9y ago
  Dev-Prod parity is probably the best reason to want the extra power, but then you're just limiting your software to the lowest common denominator between mobile computing and a server farm. At the end of the day, if you want to take advantage of the big guns, you will have to sacrifice mobility or parity and spend some good time on devOps. And even an extra 16GB won't get you around that. Also, 250 tabs? dayum. I don't know how anyone could effectively use that many tabs. I don't think thats what browsers/laptops are designed for. My mind memory of just the tabs would be saturated long before the laptop's.