Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm typing this on a windows PC with 192GB ram. 64GB RAM LIMIT? WHY OH WHY? it is 2013. 64GB is not enough for many serious tasks.

(repost from a similar thread earlier today)

The RAM limits on laptops are nearly understandable. But on a machine like this, it seems like obvious greed on the part of Apple to give this machine a maximum life span of 3-4 years.

edit: spelling

Just out of curiosity, what sort of serious tasks does one use 192GB of RAM for? (I'm not implying that there aren't any; just want some examples.)

I guess the industries that benefit from "the more RAM the better, with no limit" would be 3d rendering, video editing, simulations, and large-format photography. I am doing the latter, joining together thousands or tens of thousands of images into a single seamless photo. for example:

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-gigapixel-roppongi-hills-mori...

http://360gigapixels.com/london-320-gigapixel-panorama/

http://www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html

I am aware that in many applications, the GPU has taken over for some of the "heavy lifting", but that is not true in all cases. Given there are basically no real power or thermal considerations limiting the RAM for a computer like this, I would really like to know if this 64GB limit is real, or if it is due to what RAM modules are available on the market now. Is it a limit in the OS? Will the Mac Pro be able to have 256GB RAM in the future, or not?

it is 2013. 64GB is not enough for many serious tasks.

You present a few valid examples. But I can't see how that represents "many" tasks; it's a very, very small subset of the fields in which people use computers for work.

If there were no hardware out there that supports the RAM requirements you're talking about, that'd be a great area for development. But if you're suggesting everything -- or even most things -- should support what to most of us is an over-the-top amount of memory, perhaps your niche is not quite as major as you think.

I agree that it's a niche application, but imho it's one of the target demographics of a 4k+ USD workstation. I'd like to know the reason (software/hardware) behind the 64 GB limitation as well.

There are only four ram slots. The largest ECC stick available now are single 16GB sticks. Just not enough room for slots on the board, is my guess.

It's a $4000 workstation. You buy it to run big jobs. Your department buys 10 or 20. In 3 or 4 years, the amount of "big data" grows and now you need more RAM. Do you simply spend another $100k to buy all new machines? You are just thinking about today's needs but a few years out memory needs always grow.

Not disagreeing with the memory point... just pointing out that a 12 core processor would, most likely, not be sufficient to the cause in 3 or 4 years if your memory needs grew that much. So wouldn't you buy new machines anyway every 4 years if your department were doing that sort of work???

The Mac Pro itself is a niche machine and priced as such, though. I mean, it uses a Xeon workstation/server-class CPU - how many computer users need Xeon and wouldn't be just as happy with a much cheaper high-end desktop CPU?

Off topic, but that tokyo tower panorama is super cool. You can see people in buildings and in cars really far away, and they look recognizable.

It's not unheard of for Macs to be limited in how much RAM they'll recognize, but it's not common. The maximum is typically limited by the number of RAM slots and the largest modules on the market. The Mac Pro has 4 slots and 16GB modules are the biggest out there at the moment. I would put good odds on it being able to take e.g. 128GB when 32GB modules become available. But there's no guarantee.

Is it an absolute requirement that the machine on your desk is the powerful one? For example, lots of scientists and engineers rely on massive computing power to do their work, but that power is in a server room somewhere. They often have modest laptops on their desk.

Opening more than one tab in Chrome.

Workstation tasks involve as much ram as possible 1) Physics simulation

2) Large image manipulation ( what I do)

32GB is what my laptop has, for this reason I cannot take this as a serious machibe.

Large image manipulation has been done for years now, no? If we managed it ten years ago on comparably puny machines, what has changed? Images bigger I guess is one thing, but does that account for advances in RAM?

(Saying that I am amazed at how my desktop slows down with 4gb of RAM these days.)

Back in 1995, Toy Story was rendered with a server farm of 87 dual-processor 100MHz SPARCStations w/ 192MB of RAM and 30 quad-processor 100MHz SPARCStations w/ 384MB RAM.

I used to do professional digital video editing on Media 100s and Avids with 80-96 MB of RAM back in the mid-90s.

It's amazing how quickly top-of-the-line becomes crap.

Bioinformatics uses lots of memory. 3-4 years ago people were buying 512GB machines for it, and I'm sure it's crazier now.

Most bioinformaticians don't know how to code very well in my experience. (Some yes, but the majority I have worked with, no).

I doubt most people doing bioinformatics are doing their number crunching on the machine in their office. They're probably using a cluster that's maintained in a server room.

Keep in mind that these are workstations, not servers. They are intended to be used by an individual who, for whatever reason, has interactive applications with large compute requirements.

Many scientific computing tasks are memory intensive - operations on large matrices, R and Python both tend to keep their data in memory rather than writing it to disk, heavy simulation, etc.

I've slammed a cluster node with 1 TB of RAM pretty hard, I can easily see exceeding the 64 GB the Mac Pro comes with. Though my solution to this is admittedly "Toss it on the cluster".

>The RAM limits on laptops are nearly understandable. But on a machine like this, it seems like obvious greed on the part of Apple to give this machine a maximum life span of 3-4 years.

Or, you, know, basic market research that shows you're some freaky outlier, and not even 0.1% of their customers will ever attempt to add that.

Not to mention, adding tons of RAM (for multi thousand dollars) and complaining of the machine having a "maximum life span of 3-4 years"?

Why would a pro that has an actual need for a Mac Pro saddle himself with it over 3-4 years? 3-4 years are like forever in tech. There'd be new memory speeds, new CPUs, new GPUs, new SSDs, new buses and such. If he's doing stuff the Mac Pro demographics does (video, audio etc), he'll want to update anyway...

> it seems like obvious greed on the part of Apple to give this machine a maximum life span of 3-4 years.

Yeah, obviously they are evil. 64GB is clearly not enough. 192GB is totally common place.

Let's quit hyperbole everytime something from Apple is mentioned. The specs are solid for the majority of the use cases.

We used to run print production for a major advertising agency mailing millions of pieces per week using 8gb of ram with Dual Core G5s. This machine is aimed at designers/agencies with fat budgets that might need to do Video editing / light 3D work / After Effects every now and then. That was always the bread and butter of the previous Mac Pros, it's also why they tried to make it look nice on your desktop (though I think they failed)

Honestly, Apple is not worried about the segment of the market that needs 192GB of ram - I'm sure it's orders of magnitude smaller then the ones who need 64GB.

It's limited by the system rather than OS. I'm typing on an HP Z420, and there's a 64GB limit too.

Nothing to do with Windows and Mac OS.

Apple is also a hardware vendor

So is HP. My point is that it's not uncommon for a workstation class computer to have 64GB memory limit in 2013.

They also offer machines that go over this.

From what I can tell, the HP Z420 is under half the price of the base Mac Pro. I'm not sure they're even in the same market segment.

Supporting more memory carries significant performance penalties. Until they make jumbo DIMMs which are as fast as smaller ones, perhaps it's not a good idea to offer the option.

I'm struggling to think of tasks that necessitate 192GB of RAM that are really best suited for a Desktop machine and not for a server cluster.

I'm sure that form factor is an issue. 10 inches long x 6 inch diameter. That's tiny - less than half the volume of a 1u rack server.

Not if your short-depth 1U is < 8.5".

(relax, I'm agreeing with you.)

Do they make DDR3 ECC sticks bigger than 16GB?

The major disadvantage seems to be bandwidth and cost though, only 1333MHz.

http://www.transcend-info.com/Press/index.asp?LangNo=0&Func1...

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Transcend-memory-32-GB-DIMM...

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT32G3EL...

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