You could buy a slower Xeon for around the same price if you really needed more than 64 gigs of memory.
http://ark.intel.com/products/75269/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
And it supports ECC.
http://ark.intel.com/products/75269/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...
And it supports ECC.
If you read my post again, I'm not saying that 64gb is too little right now. It's probably the right match for the processor for most workloads, today. 32gb would seem weak with 8c/16t (I have that much in my 4770 system), and 128gb could be excessive.
But in two years, swapping in 128gb would be the no-brainer upgrade to this thing. That this is being ruled out ahead of time is not a good thing.
(Barring an Intel microcode revision, as is being speculated by the sibling commenters. But I'm not holding my breath, as Intel Ark is pretty definitive.)
If you think 64gb will be an easy limit for an average user to hit in the near future I would love to hear your envisioned use case.
Put it this way: a $120, dual core Core i3-2100 released in 2011 has support for 32gb of ram. But a $1000 eight core processor, released more than three years later, for nearly ten times the price, supports just twice as much memory.
I believe this is imbalanced. And expecting to be able to upgrade a workstation tomorrow, when purchased today for likely well over $2000, is not unreasonable.
There's lots of really good reasons to do this (sandboxing, ease of installation, compatibility, snapshots/state saving, etc.) and VM tech at the consumer level is good enough for most applications. Doing so also enables you to distribute the same application for different host architectures relatively easily (swap out the virtualization core with an emulation core).
VM technology basically will allow consumer software vendors to start treating your computer like a set-spec videogame console instead of worrying about millions or billions of possible complications from how your computer is set up. Once VMs in the consumer space get good enough to really run high-end games, imagine everybody just writes to some Valve defined Linux spec that just happens to match some Steam Box, but you can install the VM for that game on your Mac or Windows or whatever and get to gaming.
If this happens, VMs will chew through RAM faster than just about anything out there.
So instead of installing and running Adobe Suite, you start up the Adobe Suite VM and boom, 8GB of your RAM vaporizes. Fire up your web browser VM and boom, there goes another 4GB. Your e-mail client annihilates 4GB more and now we've eaten up 16GB of RAM to run a handful of applications. Open up an MS-Office component and there goes another 8-16GB. Run a non-virtualized legacy app? Why those all just get sandboxed into an automatic "old shit" VM so the virii keep out.
This isn't inconceivable and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this wasn't already on the drawing boards somewhere.
Using VMs for apps does make sense for some pro apps, especially those with idiotic system requirements and/or copy protection. And obviously for testing.
Nobody (consumers) really care that it makes it easier for app developers or most of the other benefits, but consumers can be scared into all kinds of weirdness.
Bonus for PC makers, it would give a huge boost to kick off the upgrade cycle again for home PCs. More cores, more RAM, more disk space needed for all these dozens of VMs (each with their own multi-GB OS and software install).
Heck, I know of at least half a dozen people who do a variant of this right now in order to run a single Windows only application on their Macs.
Full VMs for regular desktop apps? I don't think so. We already have sandboxes.
And in any case, this wont happen in the life span of this professor being relevant (say, 5 years), so, it can't be an issue that necessitates 64 bit.
I'm still happily running a Mac Pro I maxxed out in 2008 and expect a couple more years out of it at the least.
It would be nice if this kind of machine could last a similar 6-8 years instead of entering (and I think that was the OPs point) 'engineered' obsolescence in 4/5 years?
No, he's reffering to what will happen in "2 years". I quote: "But in two years, swapping in 128gb would be the no-brainer upgrade to this thing. That this is being ruled out ahead of time is not a good thing".
And there's just no way that normal users will run their desktop apps in VMs in two years -- which is what was said a as a justification for needing > 64gb.