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Idk... I'm struggling to see why an average user in the overclocking/high-end pc market would run into the 64 gig limit assuming the high end market has a relat

Idk... I'm struggling to see why an average user in the overclocking/high-end pc market would run into the 64 gig limit assuming the high end market has a relatively short part lifetime. I mean if you're in it for the video editing then the sky is the limit but for an average user? A user could ram-cache 4 hard drives with a 4gb buffer each, power up the entire adobe suite including Illustrator, Photoshop, start a browser session with 100 tabs and 10 video streams, torrent client, email client, backup client, vpn, a couple modest ftp and web servers, a transcoding media streaming server AND crysis 3 and still likely have 10-20 gigs to play with. I think if you need much more than that running concurrently you probably should be starting to think about server hardware. If you think 64gb will be an easy limit for an average user to hit in the near future I would love to hear your envisioned use case.

reitzensteinm 12y ago
Your use case would not use more than 64gb of memory, no; but it would also run on the CPU side just fine with a $339 4c/8t 4770k. A user with that workload wouldn't need 128gb, but they'd also not need an 8 core CPU. Put it this way: a $120, dual core Core i3-2100 released in 2011 has support for 32gb of ram. But a $1000 eight core processor, released more than three years later, for nearly ten times the price, supports just twice as much memory. I believe this is imbalanced. And expecting to be able to upgrade a workstation tomorrow, when purchased today for likely well over $2000, is not unreasonable.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I doubt many people pair an i3 with 32gb RAM.
bane 12y ago
I think it's going to start becoming reasonable to package up applications in VMs and distributing the VMs "appliances" to run instead of installing software directly in the OS. I think this is going to start happening regularly in the consumer space sooner rather than later (and already has in some cases like with XP Mode). This is pretty much modus operandi in the service space today. There's lots of really good reasons to do this (sandboxing, ease of installation, compatibility, snapshots/state saving, etc.) and VM tech at the consumer level is good enough for most applications. Doing so also enables you to distribute the same application for different host architectures relatively easily (swap out the virtualization core with an emulation core). VM technology basically will allow consumer software vendors to start treating your computer like a set-spec videogame console instead of worrying about millions or billions of possible complications from how your computer is set up. Once VMs in the consumer space get good enough to really run high-end games, imagine everybody just writes to some Valve defined Linux spec that just happens to match some Steam Box, but you can install the VM for that game on your Mac or Windows or whatever and get to gaming. If this happens, VMs will chew through RAM faster than just about anything out there. So instead of installing and running Adobe Suite, you start up the Adobe Suite VM and boom, 8GB of your RAM vaporizes. Fire up your web browser VM and boom, there goes another 4GB. Your e-mail client annihilates 4GB more and now we've eaten up 16GB of RAM to run a handful of applications. Open up an MS-Office component and there goes another 8-16GB. Run a non-virtualized legacy app? Why those all just get sandboxed into an automatic "old shit" VM so the virii keep out. This isn't inconceivable and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this wasn't already on the drawing boards somewhere.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  Funny, this occurred to me more than ten years ago (as a result of seeing knoppix, actually) but it still hasn't come to pass. Given the increasing importance of mobile, i doubt many users will sacrifice battery life or laptop comfort for the dubious benefit of having their applications partitioned into VMs. Using VMs for apps does make sense for some pro apps, especially those with idiotic system requirements and/or copy protection. And obviously for testing.
  - bane 12y ago
    I can see it being spun pretty hard as an anti-virus initiative at some point, or a "guarantee you software investment into the future" kind of thing. Nobody (consumers) really care that it makes it easier for app developers or most of the other benefits, but consumers can be scared into all kinds of weirdness. Bonus for PC makers, it would give a huge boost to kick off the upgrade cycle again for home PCs. More cores, more RAM, more disk space needed for all these dozens of VMs (each with their own multi-GB OS and software install). Heck, I know of at least half a dozen people who do a variant of this right now in order to run a single Windows only application on their Macs.
    - clarry 12y ago
      If this gets popular, I can see them stripping the OS and other cruft down so that the application almost runs on bare (virtual) metal. A complete desktop OS with user software and drivers for all the unused hardware sounds unlikely.
      - arghnoname 12y ago
        This is basically what OSv is. It's stripped down virtualization environment meant to only run a single application on bare (virtual) metal.
    - Tloewald 12y ago
      Proof of concept viruses are already out for this architecture, so it just becomes a bigger management headache.
sitkack 12y ago
Adobe products (looking at you After Effects) consume way more memory than you are giving them credit for. 64GB is not enough memory to support the computation this part is capable of. Next year, this chip will support at least 128GB.

reitzensteinm 12y ago

Your use case would not use more than 64gb of memory, no; but it would also run on the CPU side just fine with a $339 4c/8t 4770k. A user with that workload wouldn't need 128gb, but they'd also not need an 8 core CPU. Put it this way: a $120, dual core Core i3-2100 released in 2011 has support for 32gb of ram. But a $1000 eight core processor, released more than three years later, for nearly ten times the price, supports just twice as much memory. I believe this is imbalanced. And expecting to be able to upgrade a workstation tomorrow, when purchased today for likely well over $2000, is not unreasonable.

jiggy2011 12y ago
I doubt many people pair an i3 with 32gb RAM.

bane 12y ago

I think it's going to start becoming reasonable to package up applications in VMs and distributing the VMs "appliances" to run instead of installing software directly in the OS. I think this is going to start happening regularly in the consumer space sooner rather than later (and already has in some cases like with XP Mode). This is pretty much modus operandi in the service space today. There's lots of really good reasons to do this (sandboxing, ease of installation, compatibility, snapshots/state saving, etc.) and VM tech at the consumer level is good enough for most applications. Doing so also enables you to distribute the same application for different host architectures relatively easily (swap out the virtualization core with an emulation core). VM technology basically will allow consumer software vendors to start treating your computer like a set-spec videogame console instead of worrying about millions or billions of possible complications from how your computer is set up. Once VMs in the consumer space get good enough to really run high-end games, imagine everybody just writes to some Valve defined Linux spec that just happens to match some Steam Box, but you can install the VM for that game on your Mac or Windows or whatever and get to gaming. If this happens, VMs will chew through RAM faster than just about anything out there. So instead of installing and running Adobe Suite, you start up the Adobe Suite VM and boom, 8GB of your RAM vaporizes. Fire up your web browser VM and boom, there goes another 4GB. Your e-mail client annihilates 4GB more and now we've eaten up 16GB of RAM to run a handful of applications. Open up an MS-Office component and there goes another 8-16GB. Run a non-virtualized legacy app? Why those all just get sandboxed into an automatic "old shit" VM so the virii keep out. This isn't inconceivable and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this wasn't already on the drawing boards somewhere.

Tloewald 12y ago
Funny, this occurred to me more than ten years ago (as a result of seeing knoppix, actually) but it still hasn't come to pass. Given the increasing importance of mobile, i doubt many users will sacrifice battery life or laptop comfort for the dubious benefit of having their applications partitioned into VMs. Using VMs for apps does make sense for some pro apps, especially those with idiotic system requirements and/or copy protection. And obviously for testing.
- bane 12y ago
  I can see it being spun pretty hard as an anti-virus initiative at some point, or a "guarantee you software investment into the future" kind of thing. Nobody (consumers) really care that it makes it easier for app developers or most of the other benefits, but consumers can be scared into all kinds of weirdness. Bonus for PC makers, it would give a huge boost to kick off the upgrade cycle again for home PCs. More cores, more RAM, more disk space needed for all these dozens of VMs (each with their own multi-GB OS and software install). Heck, I know of at least half a dozen people who do a variant of this right now in order to run a single Windows only application on their Macs.
  - clarry 12y ago
    If this gets popular, I can see them stripping the OS and other cruft down so that the application almost runs on bare (virtual) metal. A complete desktop OS with user software and drivers for all the unused hardware sounds unlikely.
    - arghnoname 12y ago
      This is basically what OSv is. It's stripped down virtualization environment meant to only run a single application on bare (virtual) metal.
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    Proof of concept viruses are already out for this architecture, so it just becomes a bigger management headache.

sitkack 12y ago

Adobe products (looking at you After Effects) consume way more memory than you are giving them credit for. 64GB is not enough memory to support the computation this part is capable of. Next year, this chip will support at least 128GB.