I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:
- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.
- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.
- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.
Yeah, I have a 64GB M1 Max and can run local models pretty well. I bought it on release and even now it never feels slow. I may upgrade just because I want to move to the 14” since I travel more now.
You mean all of that running all the time is 70gb?
I tried freecad + blender with 8 mil sculpt model + prusaslicer, but that was only 11gb, so I added pycharm + steam and cyberpunk 2099 and that was 19gb.
The language server for many things I work on sits at 28gb per copy.. I work for twitch, our code base is not small for the website. Moving all engineers to min spec 48gb.
I'll do stuff all day prototyping data analysis approaches that will fill ram with a pandas cross join.
I put my4 into thermal shutdown 2x in the last month and hard locked it due to swap use 3 times in the last month. I keep records so I can talk with IT about or dev machine specs. Apparently you can't run 30 concurrent yarn builds on a 3gb codebase... Who knew.
This isn't a works on my box competition I'm glad your workloads are that small, you can be a lot more efficient than me. I'm also lucky I bought all this ram before it became absurdly expensive.
It doesn't negate that I'm constantly over 64gb and that I'm super happy I have 128+ on my machines.
most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics
if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient
Yeah, good luck with that at current RAM prices though. DDR5 RDIMMs are going for $20/gb+ right now which means 1tb is $20k, and that's with fairly conservative pricing too.
I've been looking at building a high memory workstation recently but the RAM prices are just prohibitive. Best option atm for 1tb+ seems to be to go back a couple gen and buy DDR4, you can get 1tb at under $5/gb right now. But obviously you're giving up some performance in the process.
