Laptops With 128GB of RAM Are Here (theverge.com) 364
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Brace yourself for laptops with 128GB of RAM because they're coming. Today, Lenovo announced its ThinkPad P52, which, along with that massive amount of memory, also features up to 6TB of storage, up to a 4K, 15.6-inch display, an eighth-gen Intel hexacore processor, and an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics card. The ThinkPad also includes two Thunderbolt three ports, HDMI 2.0, a mini DisplayPort, three USB Type-A ports, a headphone jack, and an Ethernet port. The company hasn't announced pricing yet, but it's likely going to try to compete with Dell's new 128GB-compatible workstation laptops. The Dell workstation laptops in question are the Precision 7730 and 7530, which are billed as "ready for VR" mobile workstations. According to TechRadar, "These again run with either 8th-gen Intel CPUs or Xeon processors, AMD Radeon WX or Nvidia Quadro graphics, and the potential to specify a whopping 128GB of 3200MHz system memory."
For what use? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Funny)
Modern web browser with multiple tabs.
CAD, 3D CG, Scientific, GPGPU, HPC Needs It (Score:5, Informative)
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It really depends on the work that you do.
Some CAD Designs require more power then others. If you are using CAD to design a CPU vs CAD to design a motherboard. or CAD to design a Laptop. There are different resource requirements, just because the complexity is different.
I don't do much CAD but I do a lot of Database development. Some databases would work fine with systems with under a gig of free ram. Others I really want a Terabyte of RAM. It depends on what I am trying to do with the data, how fast I nee
Re: CAD, 3D CG, Scientific, GPGPU, HPC Needs It (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are people doing CAD, etc on laptops?
Because they want/need portable workstations.
Also I was doing CAD on workstations with 8gb of ram. You do not need 128gb of ram to run cad programs.
There were a lot of people doing CAD on workstations with 1mb of RAM too, therefore 8gb is massive overkill? You'd think that 640k Bill Gates quote has had enough exposure that people would have got the point of it by now, obviously not.
Needing power sucking CPUs and multiple GPUs, this laptop does not solve that problem.
They use desktop-grade CPUs rather than low-power portable ones and if you really need it you can expand the GPU capability with an eGPU for those times that you need it.
So again, what's the point?
Oh no you can buy a laptop with 128GB of RAM, what a terrible thing! What's the point of complaining about it? If you don't need it don't buy it, if nobody needs it nobody will buy and it will go away and you can stop whining about the existence of something you don't want or need.
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Re:For what use? (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of these kinda of machines less like laptops and more like portable workstations. Its easier to transport one of these around then it is having to transport everything needed to run a similar desktop. More "on-location" work can be done rather then having to wait to get back to a studio, for example. The battery in heavy use cases can be thought of as giving the ability to move the machine from outlet to outlet without having to shut down/power off.
Re:For what use? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I use a 5 YO Lenovo W530 as a replacement for a desktop machine at home. It has a quad core i7, 32 GB of RAM, and 2GB Quadro graphics board built in. I use it for CAD and 3D mesh manipulation, among the usual things. I plug in an external keyboard, 3D mouse, regular mouse, 32" display, and speakers. It literally replaced an aging desktop that had so many fans it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Now it's quiet, and having a battery is great if there's a power failure. I spent about $350 on the W530 and al
Re:For what use? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most developers I know have a single laptop as their primary workstation. We were complaining about the 16GB limit on macbook "pro" laptops in 2015 as the on-premise software appliance we were developing at the time used about 10GB memory, which quickly ballooned to 17GB by mid-2016.
.2 and 8 VMs running on your local machine to dev/test the entire product.
The product we were using was also designed to scan other machines, which meant that you would likely have between
So yes this is absolutely supposed to replace your personal workstation. I do about half my work from home these days, the 2-3 days a week I am in the office I still probably do 4 hours of work at home. Splitting your work between two machines is a real bear. Here we are three years later and the best "professional" macbook offering still only offers 16GB memory, where Lenovo and Dell have been offering 32GB memory in laptops for two+ years now. Will I need 128 GB? No probably not tomorrow but 64GB would be a reasonable ask for someone in my line of work. There's something like half a million software developers in the Bay area, I'm sure more than 5% of them are running in to memory problems at least monthly.
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I don't have any use for something like this, either personally, or in my work. What's the point of something like this? What kind of software needs this kind of juice?
Surely none that also requires portability.
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The biggest CAD/3D models these days are for 3D buildings - like a new factory, airport or shopping center. Those CAD files can very easily become bigger than 64GB and not fit in RAM anymore. If you need to go to the construction site with a 98GB CAD model that can be inspected, how do you do that without a laptop that has 128GB RAM? Do you take a 35,000 USD dual Xeon CAD workstation with 3 GPUs that weighs 40 to 50 lbs and carry it to the construction site in a van? That's what these new laptops are for. Opening huge 3D CAD files away from the office desk - and very likely at a construction site.
No. You throw your 128 GB iMac Pro in the back of your car.
Done. And a big enough display that is is actually USABLE.
Next question?
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Sounds to me like the CAD and modeling people need to optimize their shit.
Re:For what use? (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternatively, this seems like a great use for a thin client, i.e. use your laptop to VNC into a beefier computer.
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Yeah, let me know how well that works for you from a job site where you may not always have useful cell or wifi due to conditions of the site.
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False. I travel extensively and have a monster laptop (P71 with 64 GB RAM, 17" screen, etc) so that I have my workstation whenever I am on-site with clients. I don't have to worry about maintaining two systems, sharing/transferring SW licenses (most real CAD programs have licensing systems), etc. Last week I was in China, doing work - and engineering. This week is Los Angeles. Next week is the Bay area. I take my workstation with me, because it IS portable, and it CAN replace a desktop.
Ok, I can see that use-case. But you still have to have additional displays wherever you go. ..and still, a pretty narrow market-segment.
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If you have to ask, it ain't for you.
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Informative)
Lots:
Vagrant.
Virtualbox.
Developer tools.
Photo/video editing.
Sound editing.
A 128 GB machine will be ideal for a developer who has it for his/her daily driver, and who has to show that their code works on some test VM bases via Vagrant. This gets rid of the "it works on my machine, but not in production" type of bugs.
Even if the RAM is not needed, it works as a cache, making I/O faster.
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A 128 GB machine will be ideal for a developer who has it for his/her daily driver
640GB should be enough for anybody.
I bet the chintzy bastages didn't even allow for upgrading the RAM either. At a piddly 128GB one might as well haul out the abacus. /s
Strat
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Insightful)
I felt the same when 1G ram became a thing...
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I want it. Many other consultants and engineers want it. I want a laptop that is as powerful as a "proper box" - and that I can take with me, so I can work at home, at an office, on an airplane, etc. Not all of us are simple bit-flippers, we actually design REAL, TANGIBLE goods and need something more than a basic platform that will simply run a compiler (but I do some of that too, having written commercially sold FEA packages).
As far as the cloud, when I'm working on models that 60-80 GB each, I have a
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For what use? (Score:5, Funny)
The new Windows version coming soon. You'll need at least 128GB for it.
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The ThinkPad P series are more of a mobile workstation then a laptop or a notebook computer.
I can use up 128 gigs of RAM easily. I do so at work all the time, (Normally for the first pass proof of concept, then I optimize it down).
With million record databases trying to forecast future probabilities, so to make a business decision on to hire more, or find problems to fix.
I normally have a server for this that I will remote connect to with my laptop. But If I/my place of work could afford a laptop like that
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Our "dev db" is 10 GB, down to 7GB if you take a chainsaw to it. And then each of my java containers/microservices uses 512mb so that's 16GB right there and we haven't even touched my OS or dev tools' memory requirements.
I do all my dev work in AWS and remote in because my "pro" macbook is limited to just 16GB memory. I can't even standup my dev stack on my laptop anymore.
Heaven forbid Chrome is running on a system in the same timezone as my laptop. I'm glad 640K is enough for you, but I re
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What's the point of something like this?
I don't know but the following words were probably well-chosen:
Brace yourself for laptops with 128GB of RAM...
My asshole's quivering already.
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to compete agains them self (Score:2)
Arm processor as good that the i5. So laptop urge to grow better than your next lenovo/moto phone...
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I'm in to machine learning, and this thing is right up my alley. It would be great to take my workstation with me to conferences rather than trying to VPN and remote into a rig, considering how bad the latency can get. I doubt I can personally field the cost though, so I'll not be having one any time soon. My current personal portable rig is (sadly) almost exactly 1/10 the specs of this in terms of RAM, GPU, and hard disk capacity. I would imagine that travel bloggers would love encoding video on a rig li
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"I don't have any use for something like this, either personally, or in my work. "
Just like a SUV, but you got one anyway.
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Re:Obligatory 640k is enough for everybody. (Score:5, Informative)
640k is actually a lot of storage, and enough for most (even modern) application to run their core logic. What is filling most of the RAM today is things like pictures, large data sets prefetched data. A lot of the stuff in active RAM may never be used in the application. Being that Unicode data for hello world uses two bytes for character in generals makes strings 50% inefficient.
For the time where screen resolutions were 320x200 4 color, getting data from a disk took minutes. 640k was enough for anyone. But that was for the programs of the time.
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Being that Unicode data for hello world uses two bytes for character in generals makes strings 50% inefficient.
Wut
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Better not try to explain something you don't really understand in the first place, I guess.
FWIW you're apparently conflating Unicode and UTF-16 (i.e. your Windows background is showing). The rest of the world tends to use UTF-8, which is a superset of ASCII (which is a 7 bit code BTW), and represents unicode code points using 1-6 bytes.
I still like my first computer... (Score:5, Funny)
... with 3 kB RAM, 8-colour TV display with 176x184 pixels, and magnetic tape storage.
I bet it is just as fun as this machine. At least for me.
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Colour??? COLOUR???
2 bit black and white, 1K Ram, 8k ROM, 64x44 plotting resolution.
oblig " get off my lawn" quote ;-)
In 5 minutes someone will top this of course with his punch-card machine
Re:I still like my first computer... (Score:5, Funny)
My slide rule laughs at your dependence on electricity! I'd use my abacus, but it's harder to do square roots on it.
Re:I still like my first computer... (Score:5, Funny)
You had an Abacus? We had to carve marks in stone using flint tools!
Re:I still like my first computer... (Score:5, Funny)
You had flint tools? We just had to imagine the numbers in our heads.
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Black AND white??
My computer prior to my first one only had black!
Even worse, it only had zeros - the ones weren't invented yet!
I'll admit that it was a bit of a challenge to use it.
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How long did it take you to get the 16K RAM pack? Slippery slop, man.
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Started to do that before I read the rest of your post...(and yes, my first programming was on punch cards...can't really call it "my first computer", though, since individuals didn't really own those beasts. It was just what I did my first programming course on)
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Oh, goodie. (Score:2)
That's a whole lotta spy and bloatware that we are now going to be further expected to have the RAM to maintain.
Apple, have courage (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Apple,
Please have some courage and release a pro version of your laptop. If IBM and Dell can do this, you can do the same. It's the year 2018, 16 GB should be a base, not the maximum.
Re:Apple, have courage (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Intel,
Release a mobile chipset that supports LPDDR4 so vendors can support more than 16GB of RAM without using a memory controller using 2-3x the power of the low power chips. Lots of RAM in laptops would be great but not at the cost of battery life.
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It's all about the use case. Just because I need a portable computer, doesn't mean I need to sit at a cafe all day.
Most people that use laptops for work leave them plugged in most of the time. While I appreciate a long battery life, I need the ability to perform my work to begin with.
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I honestly wonder who these people are, who flit around from place to place, using their laptop 30 minutes at a time. Sip of battery here, sip of battery there. Oops! Battery almost out, I'll just take smaller sips. I don't use my laptop like that, and I don't think most people do.
I don't think most people take their laptops everywhere with them any more. There was a time in the 2000s where coffee shops were filled with people showing off their overpriced fruit machines but that seems to have passed. I'd prefer a desktop but companies buy laptops for... reasons that I don't quite understand. Probably because so many more of us work remotely and/or from home, that it's the only sane thing to do.
I honestly wonder who these people are, who flit around from place to place, using their
Re:Apple, have courage (Score:5, Insightful)
Wanting good battery life is not about sitting in a cafe all day. I want a portable computer that I can use places away from my office/desk for long periods of time without hunting for a power outlet. I also want to use my laptop and not have it throttle way down on the battery. It would also really nice for it to be light so it doesn't weigh down my bag.
Portables have aspects with inverse proportions. Intel dropping the ball after Skylake has meant any manufacturers wanting high performance parts in a small envelope can't pack a lot of RAM unless they sacrifice battery life by using much higher power draw DDR4.
A higher power draw means lower battery life (for the same sized battery) and likely a lot of thermal throttling issues. DDR4 uses several times as much power as LPDDR3E used in the MacBook lines. Even if you are willing to sacrifice the battery life, the thermals would be a major issue even on AC power. The higher power RAM/controller would eat up the thermal budget for the CPU meaning it would enter TurboBoost mode less often or worst case actually stay throttled down.
The ThinkPad in the story is a brick. This means thermals and battery life probably aren't major concerns. From the looks of it actual portability isn't much of a concern either.
Almost there... (Score:5, Funny)
Call me when they have 640 GB of RAM, thought ought to be enough for anybody !!!
A.
Pictures (Score:3)
I was curious to see how this beast looked like. I can't find pics on Lenovo's own site, but notebookcheck.net has an article [notebookcheck.net]. Pics from the article:
Image 1 [notebookcheck.net]
Image 2 [notebookcheck.net]
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If that's an actual pic, it has REAL buttons at the bottom of the trackpad. I'd love to know how to get them, I can't find one without the awful "buttons integrated into trackpad" design these days.
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Pics explain the need for 128GB.... It's running Windows 10
[ducks]
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll buy one for $300 in about 5 years!
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It's cheap steel you wont be getting. I hear the price of a Toyota may be going up by as much as $400.
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Tell them to leave off the flimsy trunk liner. That's your $400 right there.
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6-row keyboard (Score:2, Insightful)
Still waiting them out on my x220, waiting for real keyboards to return.
Yo Mamma (Score:2)
Now I can finally open a pic of yo mamma!
*badum-ching
Arm announce ... (Score:2)
Arm processor as good that the i5. So laptop urge to grow better than your next phone... but then who need a 128gb laptop ?
Porn aficionados rejoice! (Score:2)
Laptops aren't really designed (Score:3)
for power hungry applications as they don't really handle thermal dissipation as well as their full size workstation brethren.
Not to mention the high end hardware that can deliver the power you need will eat a battery so fast it's shocking.
Since the damn thing is going to have to be plugged in at all times anyway ( with the added bonus of that tiny ass screen ) why
get a laptop for this sort of work ? ( I use CAD and DCC software and I'm sure as hell not going to do it on a 17" monitor on a road trip )
Additionally, I've never really liked laptops as their upgrade possibilities are extremely limited ( if they exist at all ).
Re:Pointless ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pointless ... (Score:4, Informative)
At extremely high DPI you might not need to anti-alias fonts, which tends to make them blurry. Even so I calculated that panel to be only 280 DPI. That's nice but it's not the extreme end of things, and in the ball park of the early Retina displays.
Re:Laptops with 128 GB of RAM... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Laptops with 128 GB of RAM... (Score:4, Interesting)
Call it a portable workstation, if you like that. I need my "laptops" to move around with me - so I have a properly specced computer with me wherever I work. I don't necessarily need a lot of battery life. Just because you CAN'T see a usecase, doesn't mean there ISN"T one.
The problem is that something that needs that much horsepower almost always needs multiple displays. and those just don't "port" as easily as a laptop; so again, if you have to lug around your environment to be efficient, then why not at least port around a high-end All-In-One, like an iMac Pro. it is available with up to 128 GB RAM, 18-Core Xeons, multiple TB3 ports, built-in 5k display that is large enough to actually SEE things on, etc...
imac pro no repair over priced upgrades and storag (Score:2)
imac pro no repair over priced upgrades and storage locked on MB Starting at only $4999
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imac pro no repair over priced upgrades and storage locked on MB Starting at only $4999
whatever.
You actually think this laptop will be significantly less than that?
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So at your home office you have your multi-monitor setup, and at your on-site office you have your multimonitor setup, and now you have a 'portable' workstation that you can more easily lug between the two.
Meh.
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CAD and 3D models are getting really huge these days. Particularly in architectural visualization. So if you need to load the 3D CAD model of an entire car engine, or the highly complex 3D model of an entire shopping center, you may very well run out of RAM if you only have 64GB. In architectural visualization, you may be loading a building model that has dozens of rooms or hundreds of windows and other details. 128GB is not unusual to work on such monster scenes, and it has never been available in mobile form until today. So there are real world uses for that much RAM.
But not supported by a single 15" laptop display, unless you are TRULY desperate.
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You can buy a few monitors to leave on the various desks you'd use something like this on. Much cheaper than entire workstations at each location and you always have your data with you.
As I said above: "Meh".
Look at your mouse too... (Score:2)
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Did you know optical mice use ~ 5 times the power of roller-ball mice?
What about capactive touchpads?
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why even call something like this a Laptop?
It's a typographical error. They meant "cell phones".
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why even call something like this a Laptop?
It's a typographical error. They meant "cell phones".
LOL!
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It appears to have a "longer battery life" than the P51, which has a 9-hour battery life.
Unpossible. Not with that much RAM, GPU, CPU.
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I have a 64 GB, 1 TB Lenovo P71 with a 17.3" screen - and a 99 Whr battery, stock. I get a solid 7-8 hours on battery from it - enough for about a full day of work (a few hours of meetings, lunch - and that leaves 7-8 hours of run time). Sure, it's 8 pounds - but it can actually be used to design something like a Macbook, whereas a Macbook - can't.
Oh, it also has 4 USB type A connectors, HDMI (great so I can plug into just about any projector without the need for a flaky dongle that is always forgotten),
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I mean, why
Because people have use cases for portable workstations with a built-in screen and are smart enough to understand that more power requires a lower battery life, and they're willing to make that trade-off. This is how every market-based purchasing decision anywhere and everywhere is made.
It's probably not the same person you see at Starbucks with a MacBook Air sipping a flat white while being outraged on Twitter.
That's actually OK.
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I mean, why
Because people have use cases for portable workstations with a built-in screen and are smart enough to understand that more power requires a lower battery life, and they're willing to make that trade-off. This is how every market-based purchasing decision anywhere and everywhere is made.
It's probably not the same person you see at Starbucks with a MacBook Air sipping a flat white while being outraged on Twitter.
That's actually OK.
Really? Are you SURE?!?
Well, it does appear there may be some limited use-cases for this kind of laptop; but they are pretty rare, methinks.
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I would think you would want the ecc option - if you are loading that much data into ram to work on it will probably be a task that takes a while and requires accuracy and stability.
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Loading and viewing large data sets in science and industry. Maybe you'd do calculations on the data sets on some big network of servers, but at the site you might want to browse the results of your oil and gas survey without access to a network.
And for many of us we only have laptops at work and no longer get powerful desktop workstations. I now have to remotely access the real processing power as it is shared by multiple employees over multiple timezones. I will admit that while inconvenient our new envir
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