I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but I'm also aware there are workloads that I'm completely ignorant of.
I have 32GB, so unless I’m careless everything usually fits in memory without swapping. If you got over things get slow and you notice.
I'm finding I need to commit and print a lot of these. Logic's little checker in the upper right showing RAM, Disk IO, CPU, etc also show that it is getting close to memory limits on certain instruments with many layers.
So as someone who would be willing to dump $4k into a laptop where its main workload is only audio production, I would feel much safer going with 64GB knowing there's no real upgrade if I were to go with the 32GB model outside of buying a totally new machine.
Edit: And yes, there is does show the typical "fear of committing" issue that plagues all of us people making music. It's more of a "nice to have" than a necessity, but I would still consider it a wise investment. At least in my eyes. Everyone's workflow varies and others have different opinions on the matter.
I have to wonder how Apple plans to replace the Mac Pro - the whole benefit of M1 is that gluing the memory to the chip (in a user-hostile way) provides significant performance benefits; but I don't see Apple actually engineering a 1TB+ RAM SKU or an Apple Silicon machine with socketed DRAM channels anytime soon.
My bet is that they will get rid of the Mac Pro entirely. Too low ROI for them at this point.
My hope is to see an ARM workstation where all components are standard and serviceable.
I cannot believe we are in the era of glued batteries and soldered SSDs that are guaranteed to fail and take the whole machine with them.
16-32GB of RAM on the SOC, with DRAM sockets for usage past the built in amount.
Though by the time we see an ARM MacPro they might move to stacked DRAM on the SOC. But i'd really think two tier memory system would be apple's method of choice.
I'd also expect a dual SOC setup.
So I don't expect to see that anytime soon.
I'd love to get my hands on a Mac Mini with the M1 Max.
And unused RAM isn't wasted - the system will use it for caching. Frankly I see memory as one of the cheapest performance variables you can tweak in any system.
Don't worry, Chrome will eat that up in no time!
More seriously, I look forward to more RAM for some of the datasets I work with. At least so I don't have to close everything else while running those workloads.
Some of my projects work with big in memory databases. Add regular tasks and video processing on top and there you go.
I could of course chop up the workload earlier, or use samples more often. Still, while not strictly necessary, I regularly find I get stuff done quicker and with less effort thanks to it.
But I love the fact that you have this cute little theory to doubt my actual experience to infer that I would make this up.
>> I was processing 16bit RAW images at full resolution.
>> ...using After Effects to render out full frame ProRes 4444.
Those are two different applications to most of us. No one is accusing you of making things up, just that the first post wasn't fully descriptive of your use case.
The facts were suspect, your follow up is further proof I had good reason to be suspect. First off, the RAW images from a 5D aren’t 16 bit. ;) Importantly, the out of memory error had nothing to do with the “16 bit RAW files”, it was video rendering lots of high res images that was the issue which is a very different issue and of course lots of RAM is needed there. Anyway, notice I said “but it’s plausible if you’ve way undersold what you’re doing”, which is definitely the case here, so I’m not sure why it bothered you.
> Canon RAW images are 14bit
You don’t see the issue?
> Are you just trying to be argumentative for the fun?
In the beginning, I very politely asked a clarifying question making sure not to call you a liar as I was sure there was more to the story. You’re the one who’s been defensive and combative since, and honestly misrepresenting facts the entire time. Where you wrong at any point? Only slightly, but you left out so many details that were actually important to the story for anyone to get any value out of your anecdata. Thanks to my persistence, anyone who wanted to learn from your experience now can.
Some of the genetics stuff I work on requires absolute gobs of RAM. I have a single process that requires around 400GB of RAM that I need to run quite regularly.
Isn’t that just the OS saying “unused memory is wasted memory”? Most of it is likely cache that can easily be evicted with higher memory pressure.
You answered yourself.
I mean, some of this comes down to poor executive function on my part, failing to manage resources I’m no longer using. But that’s also a valid use case for me and I’m much more effective at whatever I’m doing if I can defer it with a larger memory capacity.