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Comment by c2h5oh | Hacker News Reader

Some examples that can easily push you beyond 64 GB: - high resolution photo editing: when you start with a 80 mpix / 48 bit photo from a medium format camera pushing beyond 16 GB requires only a couple layers and a couple undo steps being available - high resolution video processing. 1 second of uncompressed 4k 60fps video is almost 1.4GB - very large application compilation: building Android requires 16GB of RAM/swap - I'm sure there are apps that push that requirement even further - development environment for a complex system that requires you to run dozens of VMs if you want all components running locally (I've had to run 2 VMs with 12GB requirements each once)

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If you can afford a $30,000 medium format camera, you can afford the Xeon workstation it usually needs. The kind of person that work with those systems would pay $6,000 for an umbrella that doesn't even have any electronics in it: https://www.adorama.com/bcb3355203.html?gclid=CLKvmd2erNICFY...

Absolutely no one that owns one of these professional cameras uses them with non-Xeon CPUs.

Really the only use for greater than 64Gb for non-Xeon CPUs would be student animation or machine-learning projects.

It's 25 pounds so not really an umbrella. It's like calling Xeon's just sand.

While still true it might not be for long: "advanced amateur" small formal SLRs with 36mpix @42bpp now start below $2000 and 24mpix @36bpp in the lower part of $500-1000 bracket.

https://www.adorama.com/ipxk1.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd810.html https://www.adorama.com/inkd7100.html

Which brings a slightly unrelated note: people seem to be blissfully unaware that you need less than 9mpix for a 12x9" 300 dpi print or that the zoom lens they bought with the camera has sharpness that effectively limits the resolution to 5-10, maybe 12 mpix if they are lucky. But megapixel count is easy to sell -> race for more megapixels -> smaller physical pixels -> more signal amplification needed -> more noise / general lower photo quality.

I used to shoot 33megapixel medium format cameras 10 years ago, on 8GB machines with 1GB GPUs just fine, doing multilayer photoshop on 48-bits-per-pixel TIFFs.

64Gb is completely unnecessary for photography. Photographers don't even go over 16GB.

Just because someone can afford to rent a $30,000 camera doesn't necessarily mean they have unlimited cash to burn on other things.

No, but the difference between i7 and Xeon is significantly less than what you'd have to pay for that extra RAM. We're talking O($100).

So O($1)?

If you are buying that level of professional gear, it's probably for a profession. The rates you are charging ought to include the necessary costs of all necessary equipment.

It's about $2000/week to rent an IQ180. If you can afford the rental price, you can afford a computer to process the images.

thats not how money works. Just because you can afford one expensive luxury, doesnt mean you can afford all the other expensive stuff. Sometimes you do sacrifice all the other thing to get that one important expensive stuff

Also the camera rental cost goes to the client. The computers to process are generally owned by the company doing the work. Big difference. I will regularily spend $1-2k for cameras for ~1 week, and pass that on, but still use our own gear for processing.

"I can't afford the premium gasoline my Ferrari needs."

Pro photographers don't do that.

That still doesn't follow. Having a certain amount of money doesn't imply that you have even more money, nor that you want to spend more than is truly necessary.

Sure it does. If someone can't afford the machine necessary to process the images that they got from the camera they spent thousands to rent, the problem isn't actually money. It's that they're an idiot.

You don't buy/rent a camera you can't afford to process images from just like you don't buy a car you can't afford to service and you don't buy a house you can't afford taxes for. Or if you do, I have little to no sympathy.

The specifications from the client are quite particular, and usually only one or a few cameras meets the spec.

The computers often are owned by the company renting the gear, where the end customer pays for the camera rental.

So it's not so simple. And one thing - go easy on using the word idiot... I work with some very smart people who fit your description of idiot on a regular basis.

You're a professional that clients are paying multiple thousands of dollars for photography and you cannot afford the hardware to process their images? Color me skeptical.

If it's really true, then your pricing is clearly wrong.

Having >64GB is far from necessary to edit any kind of multimedia, but it would be helpful to have. If your goal is to capture high-quality imagery on a $2,500 budget, the camera is more import than the RAM. It's just that you might end up with $500 unspent if you can't afford a $500 RAM upgrade and a whole new computer to use it. There are far more photographers and indy filmmakers in a situation where they have to make these kinds of tradeoffs than the tiny minority making tons of money.

Rent an Azure G5 and remote in perhaps?

I am a FEA Consultant and work with Abaqus and LS-Dyna. I need >64 GB now.

What camera is capturing 16GB photos? An IQ180 captures 80 megapixels but the images are something like 500 MB each.

All of your hypothetical examples are also for very niche high-resource usage professionals. It's absurd that these cases need extremely high memory support from consumer processors. Intel is not obligated to subsidize anyone, especially not people who can afford to pay for high end systems.

To address the core of your argument: no one is saying Intel should subsidize anything. The assertion is that using monopoly status to do additional work to gimp functionality in one product line and artificially drive up the price of another is at least abusive in the short term, probably makes Intel less competitive in the long run, and increases the volatility of the market.

> The assertion is that using monopoly status to do additional work to gimp functionality in one product line and artificially drive up the price of another

1. Are they actually doing that? I'll be honest, I don't know for sure, but I do know that more capacity rarely comes for free. I assume that supporting 256GB of memory efficiently relative to 64GB requires either a faster clock speed or some more pins. Is Intel "gimping" the consumer product or simply not building in the extra capacity?

2. Is it necessarily a bad thing if they are? If consumer demand peaks at, say, 32GB and professional demand reaches, say, 512GB, Intel could develop two entirely different architectures, which seems wasteful and more costly to everyone. They could ship just one chip with professional capacity supported, which drives up consumer costs effectively subsidizing professionals (because professionals are no longer paying the premium for the "pro" chip; they're just buying the consumer one). Or they could ship a consumer chip that doesn't support professional needs and ship a professional chip at a price that makes pros pay for the capacity Intel had to engineer for them.

The last option seems like a good option for everyone except the people who think everyone else should pay a premium for unnecessary pro support so that a few people can get cheaper pro chips.

I think he meant 16GB memory used when editing. Not the filesize.

Same question still applies.

You asked in another sub-thread "what do people need >64 gigs for on a consumer desktop?" but jeff_vader started this sub-thread asking "what do you do if you are interested in >64gb workstations?"

AFAICT nobody on this sub-thread is claiming that consumer desktops should cater to our niche use cases. We're just offering examples of application domains where a high RAM-to-CPU ratio is useful.

You're right. I was following up on the "I absolutely hate how they cap maximum RAM on consumer machines" comment further up the chain but jeff_vader's question pivoted the conversation and I missed the memo. There are definitely cases where professionals need (or can greatly benefit from) >64GB workstations and I don't dispute that.

Not really. As the actual editing being added to the base image is what could push that. I think the question you'd be looking for is, "what amount of photo editing, effects, etc. would make the editing process of a 80mpix photo consume >16GB memory?"

Additionally, as for your original question: For hobby or even 'normal' professional photography, I'd guess none. But rigs like the ones used for Gmaps Street View, the recent CNN gigapixel, etc. would probably have the capability to approach that size.

I actually want to know what camera is capturing 80 megapixels at 48 bits per pixel. The IQ180 is 16 bits per pixel. Where's the camera that triples this? Or are we doing Bayer interpolation in a way that requires 48 bits per pixel for some reason? Because there definitely isn't 48 bits of actual signal there.

And yes, I also want to know what turns a 500MB photo into >16GB in memory. That's 32 full-res copies of the photo in memory. Just "a couple layers and a couple undo steps", really?

Bits per pixel: A lot of small frame SLRs (your Canons and Nikons) offer 12 or 14 bits per channel for a combined 36 or 42 bits per pixel. Medium format digital backs now offer 16 bits per channel.

Layer size: Layers add more data on top of this: alpha channel (8-16 bits/pixel), clipping mask and maybe half a dozen other things, easily bumping the whole thing from 6 to 9 or 10 bytes per pixel.

Layer count: It's fairly common to have multiple layers that are copies of the original photo, with different processing applied and blending them into the final one. I'm very much an amateur and when I'm serious about just making a photo look (not even creating something new) I end up with around 10 layers.

Undo step memory: a lot of work in the photo processing workflow is global: color correction, brightness, contrast, layer blending settings and modes, filters (including sharpening or blur) apply to every pixel of a layer. Each confirmed change (by releasing mouse button / lifting stylus / confirming dialog) is likely to have to store an undo step for entire layer.

Of course you can just persist some of that to disk, but if a single layer/undo step can be 800MB this will hurt productivity - only very recently we got drives that can write this much fast enough and that's why just a couple years ago, when having enough RAM was not really an option a lot of pro photographers had 10 or 15k RPM HDDs running in RAID0 in their workstations.

I replied about the 48 bit thing to the sibling comment. That may be how the Bayer interpolation is done so I won't argue that.

For the layers/undo steps, the "couple" of each was not my phrase. It was yours. If by "a couple" you actually meant dozens, then sure, maybe an 80 mpix photo really needs that much memory to process.

> I actually want to know what camera is capturing 80 megapixels at 48 bits per pixel. The IQ180 is 16 bits per pixel...

Presumably that's 16-bits for each channel of Red, Green, Blue. Since every pixel is composed of the three RGB components, that's how you get 48-bits for every pixel (and internally, Photoshop refers to 16-bits per color channel as 'RGB48Mode').

There aren't actually three channels per pixel on most sensors. It's one channel (and only one color) and then there's a mixing process. I'm doubtful that you need 48 bits to do that mixing correctly, but maybe that is the standard way to do it.

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