Comment by downrightmike
Comment by downrightmike 3 days ago
Can we just make 64GB the minimum now please
Comment by downrightmike 3 days ago
Can we just make 64GB the minimum now please
64GB is what you need to run some decent quantized mid-sized LLMs locally…with unified memory on Apple silicon. Should be standard, that would open up a lot if new applications. Incidentally, even high DPI monitors aren’t standard yet for non-mobile devices. Sad how slowly things move.
Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho
The Steam Hardware Survey is an incredibly valuable resource, what with it being freely-available, constantly updated, and sourced from a population that makes its sampling biases generally easy to identify and understand. It and the Backblaze hard drive data are almost unique in how they provide real, large-scale data about computer hardware.
It has his flaws though and is somewhat archaic. I emailed Gabe about this a while back but got no response.
I believe most consumer CPUs only have 2 memory channels w/ 1 memory controller so unless they're using 64GB UDIMMs (which I believe do exist as of this year) then gamers seem limited to 64GB total ram (2x32GB) unless they want to drop their ram frequency.
For example a 9950x3d officially supports 2 sticks at DDR5-5600 but 4 sticks at only DDR5-3600. [1]
I had a friend run into this issue on AM5 when he was trying to use 4x32GB DDR5 on his gaming PC.
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/90...
I've had that happen twice!
Recently I asked for my software developer colleage to be bought a 24 GB Macbook Air instead of 16 GB, and boss came back with "not everyone needs a super-big machine like yours Jamie!".
They seriously spent contractor time investigating whether 16 GB was "enough" to get by for our app development, for a price difference on one laptop (second hand) that was negligible compared with cost of my colleage's time.
When I was using 16 GB I regularly had to watch the spinning beachball waiting for tasks due to memory pressure. Between browsers and VMs, it was nowhere near enough for how I worked. So I knew why I was asking, and I knew the price difference was so small for the company, that it was a no-brainer. I gave justifications but it was seen as over-indulgent.
16GB has been the new minimum for under a year. Give it some more time /s
Not for low power applications