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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

Besides Tuxedo, do any vendors sell AMD Linux laptops with 96+ GB of RAM?

Sometimes I think if you need 128GB of RAM for your application then maybe it would make sense to build a tower/rack server and remote into that with your laptop.

Often, but not always, big RAM requirements like that also involve big CPU or disk requirements that would be impractical in a laptop form factor.

Is 128gb so much? My last workstation (not a laptop) had a 5950x and 128gb of DDR4 and that RAM is like 4 years old now.

I am not saying you will have it in an ultrabook form factor, but I had 32gb of ram in sandy bridge laptop (intel core i7 2700 ?) and 64 not that much later. That was like 10+ years ago. Those were desktop replacement and thicker style laptops, but not exactly unreasonable equipment.

Yes, 128 GB of memory is a shitload.

I use a lenovo laptop, a t15g2 because of 4x dimm slots that let me fit 128gb of ram, and yes, I tend to use that even under linux. I tend to do work and personal business across this device, which includes full separate firefox profiles for each, usually 4-5, and it's not uncommon to see it or chrome/chromium actually using 60-70gb, not just reserved, of ram alone each connected to gapps, teams/orfice365, whatever needed for work.

Throw in almost always using a windoze vm for windoze things for another 8gb, at times other vm's using 4-8gb doing various things for testing, libreoffice with 20 complex spreadsheets, steam games, normal use really, all adds up to a lot of at minimum reserved memory far exceeding physical, at times things ballooning within that, and thus at times getting cranky to still oom occasionally.

I rather wonder who actually uses boxes with only 8gb of ram some still ship with.

> I rather wonder who actually uses boxes with only 8gb of ram some still ship with.

Everyone else? :) Joking aside, the majority of people buy the MacBook Air, mostly with the minimum spec. Apple is expensive.

If I didn't have to run docker or didn't store media locally, I could very easily use one.

But apple has like 5% market share. 8gb with windows is really rough. There are people who don't care or can't afford performance.

Not enough*

Yes, even just 8 GB can be fine today depending on what you do.

Windows 10 on 8GB is borderline unusable. But Linux works just fine.

Windows 10 (and 11) works fine with 8 GB. You may be using applications that need more. The minimum requirement for 64-bit Windows 10 is only 2 GB, and even 4 GB can be workable depending on the application.

In my experience that is patently false.

Windows 10/11 with 8GB of ram is comfortable, using just Chrome... 4GB and it's in swap.

2GB would be unusable despite Microsoft's minimums, you will be swapping constantly.

I do stuff that uses all my RAM. New workstation has 192GB already had builds that pushed it to 180gb used. I am not alone.

I am not saying everyone needs that much, just that the bar for what warrants a dedicated server rack keeps going up and 128gb in a thick laptop seems practical.

64GB ddr5 memory modules don't even exist yet, so going 128GB would require four memory DIMMs.

My 3 year old dell has 128GB RAM and 8TB of SSDs

Huh. I thought I was pretty clear asking about laptops. Let me worry about the CPU and disk.

It's probably to run llama 70b on the laptop locally.

I want to run 405b locally (v3.1).

(⊙_⊙)

Notebook RAM is about to change. Maybe it is worth waiting a bit...

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad-p1-gen-...

People have tested the 96GB DRR5 SODIMM kit and reported it to work with framework AMD laptop (framework lets you pick none for RAM, so you won't be paying RAM you won't use). Also as far as I know no one makes DDR5 SODIMM's with >48GB per stick.

Phoenix APUs work just fine with 48GB SODIMMs (I have AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS with 16GB soldered and 48GB on a stick, outside of NUMA weirdness it's fine)

I'm typing this on a 96GB RAM Framework 16. It's a nice machine, I recommend it.

FrameWork looks like they only go up to 64GB: https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040?tab=...

It would probably be much cheaper to buy a Framework without RAM and then install 96GB yourself anyway, even if they did offer a 96GB option. It looks like they charge roughly the same amount for 2x32GB as it costs to buy 2x48GB DDR5 SODIMMs at retail.

There are working 96 GB kits. Check the Framework forum and also reddit.

the CPU in framework 16" will happily run 2x48GB SODIMMs.

ugh, I hate to be this guy, but could you possibly use off-device resources?

There’s a tonne of benefits to that approach, cooling, battery life and performance among them- and the ability to run tasks while your laptop is asleep.

I understand not wanting to own multiple devices, or cope with the power draw of an always on machine- but if you truly need such resources you will end up better off (even in the short term) with a dual system setup.

Latency

Jetbrains Gateway and VSCode remote render glyphs locally and I doubt you would be able to notice the latency on execution (ie: running your program and compiling it).

For ssh there’s mosh.

I’d buy “having to transfer files” more than latency, realistically.

Thanks for commenting though.

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