Revisiting How Much RAM Is Enough Today For Desktop Computing 350
jjslash writes: An article at TechSpot tests how much RAM you need for regular desktop computing and how it affects performance in apps and games. As it turns out, there's not much benefit going beyond 8 GB for regular programs, and surprisingly, 4GB still seems to be enough for gaming in most cases. Although RAM is cheap these days, and they had to go to absurdly unrealistic settings to simulate high demand for memory outside of virtualization, it's a good read to confirm our judgment calls on what is enough for most in 2015.
As much as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
The more RAM I have, the better.
Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.
Re:As much as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish I had about 64GB ram or more...am planning on going for a desktop this next time around of some type so that I can load it up more.
Re:As much as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is on your MBP you probably never close an app unless it's a one-off that you don't use frequently. I know I have several dozen open apps right now across 15 virtual screens and servo between them over an 8 hour day as I become blocked on one task and switch to another. Why shut them down only to spend 10 minutes relaunching? On linux or OS X, with unlimited desktops, why bother?
However on my Windows machine I tend to use just 2-3 apps at a time, and shut down before starting a new effort. This is pre-Windows 10 behavior, for the record. In windows multiple desktops was always a nuisance, so its best to close things down so your alt-tab or taskbar didn't end up unusable. I wonder if post-Win10, we don't see people using a lot more RAM.
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"Why shut them down only to spend 10 minutes relaunching?"
If shit takes 10 minutes to relaunch you're doing something horribly wrong.
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Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.
Re:As much as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.
Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.
Hmm. 1tb SSD going on newegg today for $477. Quarter of that is ~$120. What would $120 buy to dramatically speed up an office-grade dell?
I think the point is swapping out a spinning hard drive with an SSD is the single best way to show dramatic improvement to your rig, and SSD's are cheaper and more reliable than ever (plus, that whole TRIM thing with macs is now solved [arstechnica.com]). OTOH, spinning drives and 4GB RAM are still the standard on all the cheap new dells for sale out there. Once you deck out a dell with similar features to a mac, the prices become pretty comparable (e.g., Dell XPS 13 with 256 GB SSD and 8GB RAM and Windows Home is $1599 [dell.com], whereas a 13-inch Macbook Pro with similar specs comes in at $1499 [apple.com]). The rule applies: fast, reliable, cheap (choose two).
Re:As much as possible (Score:4, Interesting)
Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.
I love this argument... but you forget, spending $500 on a dell laptop means you'll still fall short on specs. Like-for-like, a comparable Dell comes in at around 60-80% of a new MBP, depending on how close you want to match the specs (and where in Apple's roadmap/cycle you buy the Dell). So at the charitable 60%, you're still spending $1200 to match a brand new $2k MBP. But wait - your Dell will last maybe 3 years maximum, unless you're really careful. That MBP he mentioned has lasted 4 years and counting... most folks I know of with an MBP usually keep them for 6-8 years or so (my own is 2 years old and counting; I just barely chucked in a second HDD for mass storage, and ripped out my optical drive to make room for it since I never use the thing.)
Re:As much as possible (Score:5, Funny)
No no no! You should never size a system based on likely real world scenarios over the lifetime of the system. You should always size a system based on single tasked benchmarks!
Re: As much as possible (Score:2)
Ditto some of my Blender scenes, which can use up 20+GB of RAM, which pretty much rules out GPU rendering for me.
Re: As much as possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed with both you and GP, but I think this indicates a shift in what's considered "desktop computing". Not that long ago this would have been server work for anyone who had enough systems to distinguish between servers and desktops.
Re: As much as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit... Video rendering and 3D creation and rendering was desktop work already back in the 90's for hobbyists and small studios, and remains so to this day.
That's what pissed me off the most with the article, the video test was limited to encoding, not actually editing clips, working with layering, effects etc. Likewise, the Blender test is very limited in how many textures and complex multi-layer shaders are involved, it stresses geometry and rendering to a greater degree.
Not to mention that when you sit and actively work with a scene, you often have photoshop, gimp or some other program open too, as part of your workflow, creating textures, UV-maps, light maps, shadow maps, mattes&masks, height maps and normal maps etc etc...
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Any computing task will eventually complete eventually. That doesn't mean that any one wants to put up with waiting for long compute jobs if they can avoid it.
Anyone that's left the garage probably wants a render farm (and has one).
Even some people that are still just working with a single rack in their bedroom probably prefer a cluster.
Re: As much as possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Any computing task will eventually complete eventually.
Are you sure about that? Church and Turing [wikipedia.org] weren't.
Re: As much as possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Render farms for 3d stuff. Previously, rendering something on your desktop that looked remotely like the finished product was almost laughable.
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That's only if you think in terms of top-end movies etc. However, there's plenty of bread and butter work being done where the final rendering is done on the desktops of the artists at small studios etc, such as advertisement spots or stills, product design, architectural visualization etc etc, and that's just on the professional side. You also have to factor in the hobbyist side.
Re: As much as possible (Score:3)
Really, anytime I see these kinds of articles pop up, I just substitute its title with "How much X is enough for our product's target market" anymore. They're really not useful as a general analysis, the desktop market is just to broad.
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So you can have lots and lots of active viruses.
ECC (Score:3)
I just wish I could buy desktops that supported ECC memory. A decade ago I could and I did.
My most recent desktop has 32 gigs of ram. With firefox alone routinely climbing to 2.5 gigs, I don't see how anybody could survive on only 4. Well, use fewer tabs I guess. But that's just how I roll -- the tabs stay open until I no longer care about their contents.
Re:ECC (Score:4, Insightful)
Look into the "workstation" offerings from PC vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. They all tend to accept ECC memory. I think, the Dell T7610 that I bought recently takes up to 256GB of ECC memory, although I currently only have 32GB in it.
If you don't need the absolute latest model and/or if you are OK with a "scratch & dent" computer, you can often find amazing deals. With a little bit of shopping, I have regularly found top of the line Dell workstations for about 30% off list price. Hypothetically, if I split it for parts and sold just the RAID controller and the CPU online, I'd already make all my money back. And that's not even mentioning the included 3 year next-business-day on-site service contract.
I have generally had great luck with my Dell purchases. Their high-end professional models aren't as cheap as a bottom-of-the-barrel PC from Best Buy. But the extra money does give you a much better machine; better performance, much better reliability, and just a really well-thought-out design. I find, I often use my computers for 6+ years before they are retired entirely. That kind of amortizes the cost.
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Which is why my current desktop machine is a Dell Precision Workstation, its an older model, still on DDR2 ram, but takes up to 24GB, and supports ECC.. It came with a Quadcore Xeon, and an Nvidia Quadro workstation-grade graphics card and does Linux perfectly. Does everything I need on 12GB of ram, but have the room to take it up to 24GB should I need more "room"... Nice part was the machine was $300, about 2 years ago... Can't beat the offlease refurb'ed Dells for good value....
Re:As much as possible (Score:4, Interesting)
The more RAM I have, the better.
Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.
Too much RAM is dangerous because without ECC the risk of corruption becomes very high.
For some stuff I do checksums on the bulk data to capture bit errors. It's not worth correcting for. Just re-run. It happens maybe a couple of times a year but my sample space on my current biggest machine is only 2 years. If it happened more often, ECC RAM would be more optimal. If I had the option for desktop computers I would be buying ECC ram.
When I abuse the company server farms, they do have ECC, but I'm running on desktops because people don't like it when I run my jobs on shared machines. 1 4 core, 8 thread i7 PC with 64Gig of ram runnning 24/7 can keep on going on, whereas shared servers in a rack somewhere have variable load and you have to nanny it.
I played with EC2, but it's expensive if your compute load is unbounded.
Re:As much as possible (Score:5, Informative)
The raw error rate for DRAM tends to correlate with DRAM chips. Raw, non-ECC soft error rates are in the neighborhood of 10 FIT/chip or say 160 FIT/DIMM for a DIMM with 16 chips. Let's consider a system with 4 DIMMs, which has 640 FIT. That's equivalent to a soft error every 178 years. Hard errors are additional, but for the typical amounts of DRAM in a PC, soft errors (and usually also hard errors) are inconsequential.
Also, field studies (see Sridharan, SC12) show that around half of all soft errors are not correctable with SECDED ECC.
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You are trying to sell a distinction that never really existed. There have always been more powerful and more expensive PCs. Always.
"workstations" were originally desktop variants from commercial Unix vendors.
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Another game dev here. Running with 32GB and Window's retarded Virtual Memory turned off. You'll love the upgrade!
One note: If you are on Windows 7 you will need Windows 7 Professional (or higher), because Win 7 Starter / Home / Premium versions are crippled to only supporting 16 GB. Microsoft "fixed" this in Windows 8.1+
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
Having 32GB allows you to spin up a few VMs each with 4GB if needed, and still have plenty of available RAM to keep 30+ tabs of Chrome/Firefox open, M
so... (Score:2)
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What if you try a more normal load? What if you opened a project in Eclipse or tried to do a build?
normal people open projects in eclipse and run builds?
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Yeah my company just replaced my 8GB MacBook Pro with a 16GM version. I do Java dev work and the 8GB limit was okay for writing code and building, but when running tests (actually running the actual software, plus all the test framework and whatnot) I'd started getting out-of-memory exceptions.
And my home desktop machine I just upped to the max of 16GB, too. That's plenty because it's Ubuntu, but I still had second thoughts about my selection of a motherboard that supports a max of 16GB RAM. Next time I'll
Running a single game? (Score:4, Funny)
Who the hell voted *that* the be-all and end-all measure of need in desktop RAM???
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I've got a Windows VM for the corporate stuff that I have to do that has 2GB allocated to it. The box that the VM used to be on has 8GB, which is more than enough for the purposes it's used for. I've got other boxes that are basically just dummy console aggregators that have 2GB and could probably get away with more like 128MB given the lack of GUI.
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2GB is quite tight for a Windows VM now ; I've recently upgraded my physical RAM to 16GB and my Windows VM to 4GB and it performs noticeably better.
All it does is run Office and a few other corporate apps.
Tested: 1)Apps; 2)Games running alongside Chrome (Score:3)
TechSpot tested three different games, each running alongside Chrome with 65 active tabs. That simulated concurrently running (AKA multitasking) RAM-hungry applications.
And before they even tested concurrent multitasking with games, TechSpot first tested the system with Blender and other applications, simulating app use.
Did you RTFA?
Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
RAM beyond 8G, if not used for programs will be used to cache disk and any time you can cache disk you win.
disk cache (Score:2)
with prevalence of SSD, disk cache is just adding latency to your I/O.
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This is far from true. Even in the case of PCIe SSD (still a rarity), RAM is an order of magnitude faster, and much more for truly random access.
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with prevalence of SSD, disk cache is
even more important to minimize the number of writes.
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Maybe someday there will be a non-Unix OS that isn't shit, but I am not holding my breath.
Of course. VMS [wikipedia.org]. It's been proven definitively. [csf.ac.at]
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Awesome and hilarious. I've never even seen a VMS system.
We need to keep demand up (Score:2)
Otherwise prices will collapse, and they'll have to burn down another factory to avoid saturating the market even worse!
Besides, more RAM means I can run a bigger Beowulf cluster of virtual machines...
Virtualization requires memory (Score:5, Insightful)
I routinely have scenarios where I have to take entire environments "on the road" with me. Either the access to "The Cloud" isn't available at a reasonable rate, or I have to simulate something in an environment where I control all the variables, like WAN speeds and such. The single best way to make VMWare run better on desktop hardware is to feed it more memory. The less it needs to swap out to hard drives, the more responsive it is.
With the advent of cheap SSDs and multicore, multithread CPUs, the "responsiveness" factor requires less memory than it did for normal workloads. I put that in quotes, because responsiveness is a very fuzzy quantity, pretty much defined as "does the user notice how slow it is?"
Why is this on SlashDot? (Score:4, Funny)
>> As it turns out, there's not much benefit going beyond 8 GB for regular programs, and surprisingly, 4GB still seems to be enough for gaming in most cases.
Why is this on SlashDot? Or am I in the minority here now because I develop, compile and look at memory dumps on desktops?
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and look at memory dumps on desktops?
That sounds like a disgustingly euphemistic photo album.
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This article is a joke. What is a "regular user" and why would slashdot care, when none of us are "regular users" ?
Some of us have lives at home (believe it or not) and some of us don't take our work home with us (believe it or not) and we are actually pretty normal users during off-hours.
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Personally I use more RAM at home (playing Cities: Skyscapes) than at work (compiling Java in Eclipse). But both machines have 16GB anyway.
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Oh right, because if I do anything
yes indeed it all revolves around you
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Speak for yourself. I use regularly.
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The author answers the question by running several experiments and giving the reader the results. Most of the Slashdot crowd is proficient enough in computer science to take those results and apply them to their own use cases. That is the value of the article: it gives you information that you can apply t
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This article is a joke. What is a "regular user" and why would slashdot care, when none of us are "regular users" ?
Many of us have family. Wives, kids, in-laws, or in some cases, Mom upstairs. Most of those family members come to us for support. Having some idea what a "regular user" does with his/her machine enables us to give decent advice.
Some people on slashdot actually offer that kind of advice professionally. They probably need to know who and what those "regular users" are.
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The results apply to use cases that many folks encounter. For example: I develop, compile, and occasionally look at memory dumps; but I also support people who use apps (one of the use cases the author tested); and I also play games and use applications (also tested in the experiments) and I support people who do too.
Moreover, this article takes the squishy question of how much RAM is enough and helps answer it with hard numbers and results that can be applied more widely than to just the
ALL THE RAMS (Score:5, Funny)
commentsubjectsaredumb (Score:2)
Even without games, even if devs are careful, bloat is inevitable. Fire up youtube and MS word at the same time on grandma's machine and you're hanging with every click.
Well yeah, so with many games still 32-bit (Score:2)
I've got a lot of memory that could theortically let me run a bunch of different games at once. But it's not too useful to any *one* of them, since they're almost all still stuck in 32-but world.
As much as conveniently fits (Score:3)
Honestly, these days if it has two memory slots I stuff it with 16GB of ram. If it has four, then 32GB of ram. Simple as that. Hell, I just put together a 'gaming box' for the son of a friend of mine a few weeks ago and thought 16GB would be enough (4x 4GB). I didn't even follow my own rule because I was being cost conscious. The first thing he did with it? Run minecraft with a visibility setting that ate up all 16GB of ram.
Even more important than ram, stuffing a SSD into the box is what really makes everything more responsive. And even if it has to do a bit of paging it's hardly noticeable when its paging to/from a SSD. And if you do both, the box will stay relevant for a very long time, probably 10 years.
But more to the point, why not?
-Matt
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If it has 2, I give it 32gb. 4, gets 64gb. Why are you limiting your ram to half its potential? 16GB sticks are affordable.
All your RAM (Score:2)
are belong to ME!
How much RAM is enough for developers? (Score:2)
A better discussion for Slashdot might be how much RAM is enough for developers.
I can barely squeak by on 6 GB, but my next laptop will need to be at least 16 GB, if not 32.
Funnily enough in my current configuration the biggest memory hog isn't VMWare or Oracle. It's Firefox.
5326 jgotts 20 0 21.584g 1.891g 108628 R 82.1 33.0 287:20.13 firefox
It's sometimes hard for me to determine whether Firefox is working properly or there is a massive bug. I have a fair number of tabs open, but never more t
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For dev work sure, 16 is pretty good. I'd say 8 was a pretty good sweet spot. I've got 16 on my desktop, 16 on my laptop and 64 on my latest server and only the server comes close to using its capacity (2 DB's and some appservers).
The desktop workload is maybe 10GB when I'm testing a full stack IDE/Client/AppServer/Database, but generally speaking 8GB is generally fine unless I'm really hammering it. Add another couple GB max if I'm doing perf analysis over the full stack, but that's not very often at all.
I
Re:How much RAM is enough for developers? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's kind of sad to see all the posters indignant over an article that tries to determine the 'sweet spot' of RAM for the average user. Almost universally, they fail to recognize that they are not a typical computer user and that the article specifically carves them out.
A rule of thumb before blasting out your complaints should be: If you have a job or a hobby that requires you to to be a heavy, continuous user of photoshop or compression software or some other RAM intensive program THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU!
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Firefox has lots of memory leaks, particularly if you run javascript-heavy sites or flash-emulated javascript.
Javascript code tends to have a lot of memory leaks (because the programmers don't think they have to worry about it). Programmers stick stuff on the DOM, and don't have a way to ever remove it, or they forget to remove things from a hash. If you have to close your Firefox once a week, that's probably what's happening.
As much or more than the developer (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a rare developer indeed that makes software that works well with less RAM than they have.
It's never *just* RAM, Video Card Biases Results (Score:2)
Anyone who is running a recently purchased system (within the last 2 years) with only 4GB of RAM is very likely using on-board video as well. Who uses these computers? Rank and file office workers and home users who don't know better.
Getting j
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Schools (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in schools (in the UK, that means the standard, mandatory education up to 18, nothing beyond that). Most places I have spoken to are wary of 64-bit, even, so they're still technically running on, what? 3.5Gb or thereabouts?
I have 64-bit throughout so I have 4Gb, but I've seen little reason to go past that. Pretty much the bottleneck is network, and if I get the network up to speed (not cheap), it would be server-side (disk array speed, etc.). The clients very rarely do anything that they aren't waiting for stuff from the network to complete.
Next year, I may go 8Gb in the clients but I would predict to see much huger speed increases by just going to SSD on the client (Lifespan under swap conditions? Meh, drives barely last a year or two for us anyway and then we're replacing the whole machine - overprovision and let it loose and suffer a tiny client hard drive for the sake of speed).
I really need cheap 10Gb kit, though - from server down to end-switch. Gigabit to the desktop is okay for now, but it won't be long. But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. There, yes, fuck, you need as much as you can get. I just doubled all my servers RAM this summer, at great expense. But the clients are running Windows, Office, a few apps and a browser and rarely make it through the day without being logged off or shut down. And we do deal with large databases and centrally-stored stuff all the time, but that's for the server to worry about. The clients, however, need next to nothing.
Easy formula... (Score:2)
Elated to depressed (Score:2)
I have 6GB which serves me fine so when I read the article I was going YAY!
Then you bastards just had to spoil it for me didn't you.
%@$#^$ing Chrome (Score:2)
Going from 4GB to 8GB... (Score:2)
Memory is useful (Score:2)
Two words: Disk Cache
I have 32 gig of memory on my system. 16 wasn't enough, i was running out of memory. with 32, I have an 8 gig ramdisk which I load my games onto (I'm only actively playing one at a time, so if I switch games, I load another). While I don't need it because of extremely fast D drive (RAID 10, 8 drives) and an SSD C drive, a good disk cache is also useful in reducing access time.
It really depends on how much disk access you need to do. I'm writing some mods fo
32 GB is enough... so far (Score:2)
Power user on Mac, need lots of RAM (Score:2)
Sometimes, the 16GB I have in my MacBook Pro isn't enough. However, that's primarily due to Safari being a horrible memory pig. I've had "safari web content" processes baloon up to 14GB.
Of course. (Score:2)
When you run a single application or game, 8 GB is enough. You need 16 GB (or even more) for running many applications at once.
Also, RAM is not cheap these days. 16 GB is more expensive now than it was 3 years ago when I bought my desktop. 57% more in Canada.
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That's what I was thinking as well, on the cost front. I built my current PC a few years ago and periodically I have checked to see if I can get another couple sticks of the RAM I'm using. And so far I've never found it cheaper, and in fact yesterday it was 20% more than it was when I bought it.
I've only very recently started having memory issues, using only 8GB. I've been hosting a dedicated server for an alpha game, running a client of the same game, and of course running sundry other applications like Fi
640 Kb? (Score:2)
People repeatedly say "Gamers!" as the people who need high performance machines. I laugh at them. Gaming machines are probably the most powerful machines owned by real people. But when it comes to corporations... It is us the physics simulation people who solve partial differential equations who need really heavy hardware. Heck, we pack 8 graphics cards, yes 8 individual cards on special purpose mother boards, into one server that does not even have a monitor. Yes, w
Not much unless there's a good reason (Score:3)
I put my current machine together a year ago with a i4790k, and a decent mobo. Installed LinuxMint 17. Then I did a little test. I ran everything I normally do at once, including VMware with 4GB of potential RAM, running AutoCAD and some other crap, in Linux running LibreOffice, Firefox with dozens of vids playing, mp3 players, Thunderbird, and half of the KDE apps. I think I finally got it near 4GB. So I added another 4GB.
If I was doing heavy media editing, maybe more could help. Or heavy computations, which I don't do much anymore. 4GB would not be an obstacle for general office, browsing, and fooling around. This machine is mostly an indulgence, since there is little perceivable increase in UI performance vs. the dual core 3GHz/4GB one it replaced.
Re:For anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
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While it's been difficult to confirm Bill actually said that specific phrase (for K), there is strong evidence he was surprised by how fast new software releases and users "used up" the full 640K, and Microsoft was caught off guard. Venders had to invent their own memory management to go beyond that rather than rely on MS-Dos.
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I heard that he actually said it, but that it's also taken out of context - he was doing a 'next 5 years' prediction, and the 640k held for the next 4 or so, so he was actually 'close'. (I know, only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades)
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Gates denies it, and the quote was more like "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and if he said it, it was referring to a specific machine at a trade show. The quote that is said to be claimed to be out of context is Ken Olson's "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
You just reminded me of a button in the 1980s that said "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, shit fights, and nuclear weapons." That and "Cthulhu in '88 - why settle for the lesser evil?" which is p
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The problem for Bill, was that he built his OS bounded on two sides. Bottom was 0, and the top was hard bounded to 640k, because that is where they put the Video (IIRC) and Bios Memory. Had they put that memory next to 0, and freed up 384 to 1 MB, then we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today.
I think Bill thought that the computer would be designed for a short period, and replaced with a new kind. The problem was the new kind came, and it was still hard bounded by 640k limit (with some fancy hac
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Re:For anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
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III, not IV. There is no IV, his son's name is Rory.
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I do 3D and compositing as a hobby user: For us, the 30+ year old rule of thumb still holds: "The more disk storage the better, you never have enough RAM, and you will ALWAYS need more CPU"
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Yeah, I'd say us VM users are definitely more RAM pigs than most. I run a linux VM isolated from my internal network that handles all my external servers (i.e. web server, ssh, etc). My web site gets hit by Chinese hackers every day, so that gives me the peace of mind that they can pretty much do nothing except vandalize the server (which is easily fixed from a VM snapshot, but I do need to find how they breached the server, which has thankfully only happened once).
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I have 32Gb because Visual C++ on an 8 core CPU is currently gobbling 24Gb and 99% CPU to compile my project. The remaining 8Gb is caching the source or it would be much slower. Because of that caching adding an SSD made no detectable difference!
The data build just barely runs 6 parallel processes in 32Gb. Just. And still takes 4-5 hours.
For normal tasks though it's complete overkill ;)
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If you play games, it might be a good idea to get at least 16GB
How much RAM is necessary if you want to invite your friends over for poker?
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Not a lot, but at least one of these [blackramwhisky.com] and case of these [blogspot.com] is a good start.
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why? Most games are still 32-bit. I can count the number of 64-bit PC titles I'm aware of on one hand and still have three fingers and a thumb left.
32-bit games will use a MAXIMUM of 4GB. If you're on a 64-bit system with 8GB RAM, great for you, your game will use all the memory it needs up to the 32-bit hard limit - 4GB. If you're on a 32-bit system, it won't address more than 4GB RAM anyway, so the maximum amount of memory available for your game will be 4GB-overhead (usually around 1.5GB for the system)
U
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Yep: my gaming rig has 6 GB of memory (it's old - my vid card has nearly as much now), and no page file. I've never had a problem with any game due to memory limits. A 32-bit game in Windows is, for all practical purposes, limited to ~3 GB, as both the kernel and a "memory window" to send data up to the video card need a range of addresses.
Game AIs that are both CPU and memory hogs are starting to emerge, however, as game developers grow into using multiple threads. I wouldn't expect the current situatio
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for general purpose desktop use anyways.
For general purpose use (i.e. browsing, email), I agree. Where extra RAM comes in handy is for running more programs CONCURRENTLY without hammering your DASD (whether SSD or HD based) based virtual memory with massive swapping back and forth to disk. More RAM enables you to get more tasks done at the same time. You can be rendering a video while at the same time, browsing the web, working with Quicken, checking email or FB, or even playing a game (assuming your CPU has enough cores/threads to spare). Bu
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Until there is something that normal desktop users would use (no, not workstations), I would like to see it stay around 4GB so that people writing applications for desktop users don't do horrible things that are solved by throwing more RAM at the problem.
The iPhone has had a small amount of RAM since the start, and this has changed only slightly, and it's been for the better.
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That seemed to be true, but I found myself getting close to "running out" more and more often on my desktop. When the wife decided to upgrade, the only advice I gave her was to consider 8G of memory to be a minimum. She does use more than half of that memory - primarily because she never seems to close a browser tab, or an application.
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You do realize that you can't buy an 8gb mid or high end laptop from Apple right? only way you get 8gb is if you buy a low end model, all the others just come with 16 or more on the desktop.
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Virtual machines are precisely the reason I bought this huge extended ATX board, with 16 slots for memory. I only have 24 gig of memory installed, but there's room for - uhhhh - 128 gig. What I have allows me to run up to four VM's at a time, as well as putting all my /tmp files and caches into ram.
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Running Netbeans with a WAMP-server with ~10GB database, 4GB has significant performance problems for me.
8GB runs smooth. Haven tried 16GB as I don't have any need to add more memory.
Obviously, memory requirements are totally dependant on what you do with it.
Games run fine in 4GB, because games are designed to run with 4GB, because 4GB is the current norm. If 8GB becomes the norm, games will start requiring 8GB.