5 ms·

I can't believe you can't believe it. Have you heard of Apple before? If anything I'm a bit more perturbed that they max out at 32GB of RAM. My aging Mac Pro ha

I can't believe you can't believe it. Have you heard of Apple before? If anything I'm a bit more perturbed that they max out at 32GB of RAM. My aging Mac Pro has more than that in it. I imagine that they preferred shipping with a default 8GB and selling a $200/600 RAM upgrade than having a higher headline price. (Incidentally, their 1GB phones still outperform phones that are one year newer with 2GB of RAM, double the cores and nearly double the GHz, so maybe they're onto something.)

bitL 12y ago
32GB is a limitation of iX Haswell, Ivy Bridge could use 64GB - Apple can't do anything about it. Let's hope Intel allows it for Broadwell-K (-Y,-U,-H variants will be restricted to at most 16GB)...
- wtallis 12y ago
  It's not a Haswell vs. Ivy Bridge distinction, it's a consumer vs. server distinction. Consumer CPUs only have dual-channel memory controllers and Intel's DDR3 controllers can't use 16GB UDIMMs or have more than 2 UDIMMs per channel. The server chips (a handful of which get some features cut off and sold under the i7 brand) have 4 memory controllers and also support RDIMMs and LRDIMMs.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    >Intel's DDR3 controllers can't use 16GB UDIMMs That is a software not a hardware limitation (in particular, I think it is in Intel's MRC). ASUS has firmware with modified MRC code that can support it.
- karon 12y ago
  That is in fact incorrect. Consumer desktop Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell all support 32 GB of RAM via 2 DDR3 channels. Enthusiast desktop processors (Sandy-E, Ivy-E, Haswell-E) support 64 GB, because they feature 4 channel memory controllers. Once the consumer chipsets move up to DDR4, you will have support for 64 GB of RAM on the desktop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29
rsynnott 12y ago
Haswell (as opposed to the pseudo-Xeon Haswell-E) caps out at 32GB.
moogleii 12y ago
I don't think this is supposed to align against Mac Pros (plus what people are already saying with the chipset memory limitation)
- Tloewald 12y ago
  It seems to me that a top-of-the-line consumer machine should be able to compete with a 3 year old workstation (that hadn't received a significant update in two years -- effectively 5yo hardware).
  - gress 12y ago
    What 3 year old workstation are you talking about?
    - Tloewald 12y ago
      Read my original post.
      - gress 12y ago
        Ok - so just an arbitrary old machine you picked. Somehow I thought there was more logic to the choice of benchmark that I was missing.
  - rgbrenner 12y ago
    Why aren't you comparing your old mac pro with a current mac pro? 12GB of RAM (up to 64GB) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ The mac pro line always had xeon processors.. so it seems odd that you would expect the same memory support on a desktop.
Tloewald 12y ago
Thanks for the info -- didn't know Haswell has that limit. (I guess that's one of the benefits of buying pro stuff.)
MrDosu 12y ago
For what do you need more then 32G RAM ever on a desktop (excluding time travelling forwards). If you are asking yourself that question you need to get a proper server or rendering farm.
- bitL 12y ago
  You'd be surprised how fast you can run out of memory if you are mastering your own, non-professional 5k/4k video and applying some advanced non-linear operations such as video stabilization. It's not GPU accelerated, parallelism is limited by the nature of the algorithm which makes rendering farms useless. Do you need a power hungry and noisy server with slower single thread performance than a top end i7 just for additional RAM? On the other hand, beyond 32GB, ECC seems to be very important so you probably won't have any choice but to buy a proper workstation unless AMD makes a miraculous processor on par with i7 (as they do support ECC in all models).
  - Xcelerate 12y ago
    > non-linear operations such as video stabilization What do you mean by non-linear? Are you referring to an equation containing a linear combination of the dependent variable and its derivatives, or something else?
    - astrange 12y ago
      Usually a non-linear video operation would mean one that doesn't just process each frame of the video beginning-to-end, like moving clips around. Stabilization seems pretty linear to me, though.
- alwillis 12y ago
  If you didn't need the 5k display but you did need more memory and rendering capacity, the Mac Pro has you covered maxing out at 64 GB of RAM or 128 GB is you use non-Apple RAM upgrades. So there's that.
- Too 12y ago
  Virtual machines behaves best with as much ram as a normal machine. Assuming you have 3 machines running, osx host and windows+linux vms and you want to give them 12gb each you are already at 30+. Might sound like a crazy setup but some times a compiler is only supported on one platform and then you want a replica of your clients server in one VM etc etc.

bitL 12y ago

32GB is a limitation of iX Haswell, Ivy Bridge could use 64GB - Apple can't do anything about it. Let's hope Intel allows it for Broadwell-K (-Y,-U,-H variants will be restricted to at most 16GB)...

wtallis 12y ago
It's not a Haswell vs. Ivy Bridge distinction, it's a consumer vs. server distinction. Consumer CPUs only have dual-channel memory controllers and Intel's DDR3 controllers can't use 16GB UDIMMs or have more than 2 UDIMMs per channel. The server chips (a handful of which get some features cut off and sold under the i7 brand) have 4 memory controllers and also support RDIMMs and LRDIMMs.
- yuhong 12y ago
  >Intel's DDR3 controllers can't use 16GB UDIMMs That is a software not a hardware limitation (in particular, I think it is in Intel's MRC). ASUS has firmware with modified MRC code that can support it.
karon 12y ago
That is in fact incorrect. Consumer desktop Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell all support 32 GB of RAM via 2 DDR3 channels. Enthusiast desktop processors (Sandy-E, Ivy-E, Haswell-E) support 64 GB, because they feature 4 channel memory controllers. Once the consumer chipsets move up to DDR4, you will have support for 64 GB of RAM on the desktop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29

rsynnott 12y ago

Haswell (as opposed to the pseudo-Xeon Haswell-E) caps out at 32GB.

moogleii 12y ago

I don't think this is supposed to align against Mac Pros (plus what people are already saying with the chipset memory limitation)

Tloewald 12y ago
It seems to me that a top-of-the-line consumer machine should be able to compete with a 3 year old workstation (that hadn't received a significant update in two years -- effectively 5yo hardware).
- gress 12y ago
  What 3 year old workstation are you talking about?
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    Read my original post.
    - gress 12y ago
      Ok - so just an arbitrary old machine you picked. Somehow I thought there was more logic to the choice of benchmark that I was missing.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  Why aren't you comparing your old mac pro with a current mac pro? 12GB of RAM (up to 64GB) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ The mac pro line always had xeon processors.. so it seems odd that you would expect the same memory support on a desktop.

Tloewald 12y ago

Thanks for the info -- didn't know Haswell has that limit. (I guess that's one of the benefits of buying pro stuff.)

MrDosu 12y ago

For what do you need more then 32G RAM ever on a desktop (excluding time travelling forwards). If you are asking yourself that question you need to get a proper server or rendering farm.

bitL 12y ago
You'd be surprised how fast you can run out of memory if you are mastering your own, non-professional 5k/4k video and applying some advanced non-linear operations such as video stabilization. It's not GPU accelerated, parallelism is limited by the nature of the algorithm which makes rendering farms useless. Do you need a power hungry and noisy server with slower single thread performance than a top end i7 just for additional RAM? On the other hand, beyond 32GB, ECC seems to be very important so you probably won't have any choice but to buy a proper workstation unless AMD makes a miraculous processor on par with i7 (as they do support ECC in all models).
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  > non-linear operations such as video stabilization What do you mean by non-linear? Are you referring to an equation containing a linear combination of the dependent variable and its derivatives, or something else?
  - astrange 12y ago
    Usually a non-linear video operation would mean one that doesn't just process each frame of the video beginning-to-end, like moving clips around. Stabilization seems pretty linear to me, though.
alwillis 12y ago
If you didn't need the 5k display but you did need more memory and rendering capacity, the Mac Pro has you covered maxing out at 64 GB of RAM or 128 GB is you use non-Apple RAM upgrades. So there's that.
Too 12y ago
Virtual machines behaves best with as much ram as a normal machine. Assuming you have 3 machines running, osx host and windows+linux vms and you want to give them 12gb each you are already at 30+. Might sound like a crazy setup but some times a compiler is only supported on one platform and then you want a replica of your clients server in one VM etc etc.