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Comment by lasereyes136 | Hacker News Reader

> developers are reportedly severely limited in the amount they can actually use.

When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

>When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

I believe around the year 2000 AMD announced AMD64 and Intel spent years insisting nobody needed 64-bit on the desktop. Then promptly got trounced by AMD for years after they finally released an AMD64 based desktop and Intel scrambled to create a netburst CPU with 64-bit capabilities. So, a long time?

That is system wide. A far cry from per process 5GB limit. I can't imagine a IPad pro toy app ever needing more then that. All of the things you'd need more for you cannot do on an Ipad.

Not necessarily, with PAE you were limited to 4gb per application while having more systemwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

No. Starting with the Pentium Pro, 32 bit x86 could leverage up to 64GB of physical RAM using PAE. (Physical Address Extension) x86-64 was created to address the 3GB (or 3.5GB, or 2GB, depending on the OS configuration) process limit.

You can do quite a bit more than "toy apps" on an iPad. Photoshop and 4k video editing come to mind.

How many GB do you have in the computer you are typing on?

I would say the 4gb limit was reached about 4 to 5 years ago.

Remember the pro is Apples idea of a replacement for a laptop and now it has a laptop class processor, why shouldn't it have laptop class ram?

To illustrate a real-world example of a "pro" use-case: these devices are absolute monsters at processing video. How much memory do you need to edit 4k video? The answer is likely "how much have you got?"

That’s the wrong answer and always has been. You don’t need to store your entire video in RAM to edit it, and never have. I’m sure you can find many descriptions of how it actually works without having to guess but 4K video processing and editing has been done for decades and decades now on computers with barely Apple Watch grade CPUs. George Lucas was using an EditDroid to edit 35mm film through the generation of edit lists on a computer controlling a Laserdisc player. The computer had very limited RAM, IIRC 16MB which was extravagant at the time.

The editing process for the average YouTube ‘content creator’ may consist of previewing a bunch of effects and transitions and animated floating text in real time until they think they’ve hit the right viral load but in practice professional editing is still done by the composition of edit lists from preview material.

> 4K video processing ... decades and decades

Hmmm... "decades and decades" seems like a stretch for digital. ;)

Are you meaning using things like Avid Composer and similar? eg software used for hollywood films and similar

Asking because I used to spec out then put those systems together for places. They were _very_ much pushing the envelope of performance (cpu, ram, disk io), even before networked editing systems became common.

When I installed Android Studio.

When I install Visual Studio.

Wasn't Visual Studio a 32bit application up to now, so that it can't use more than 4GB? I think an announcement for the next version contained 64bit? But sure - some of the sub-processes it starts might use more memory

Visual Studio 2019 and MSVC 16 are 32 bit applications, even on 64 bit Windows. They have a 3GB process limit.

Hopefully VS 2022 will be 64 bit.

> When did 5 GB of RAM become severely limited?

When you want to use 6 GB..

4K video editing maybe.

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