As much as I'd love that display, I can not believe that a $2500 computer is shipping with 8GB of RAM in almost-2015.
I imagine that they preferred shipping with a default 8GB and selling a $200/600 RAM upgrade than having a higher headline price.
(Incidentally, their 1GB phones still outperform phones that are one year newer with 2GB of RAM, double the cores and nearly double the GHz, so maybe they're onto something.)
That is a software not a hardware limitation (in particular, I think it is in Intel's MRC). ASUS has firmware with modified MRC code that can support it.
Once the consumer chipsets move up to DDR4, you will have support for 64 GB of RAM on the desktop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_%28microarchitecture%29
12GB of RAM (up to 64GB) https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
The mac pro line always had xeon processors.. so it seems odd that you would expect the same memory support on a desktop.
On the other hand, beyond 32GB, ECC seems to be very important so you probably won't have any choice but to buy a proper workstation unless AMD makes a miraculous processor on par with i7 (as they do support ECC in all models).
What do you mean by non-linear? Are you referring to an equation containing a linear combination of the dependent variable and its derivatives, or something else?
Stabilization seems pretty linear to me, though.
14745600pixels x 3 colours, 1 byte each = 44236800 bytes
44236800/1024/1024 = 42.19MB each frame
42.19MB per frame x 60 frames a second = 2531.25MB.
TB2 has a bandwidth of 20Gbps = 2560MB/s
So yeah, theoretically TB2 has enough bandwidth. But it's a very tight fit.
DisplayPort v1.3 can deliver 25.92Gbps of usable bandwidth, thus required for 5k [1].
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/190130-displayport-1-...
OS X (in my case, Mountain Lion, so an old version) - does really, really well with shared libraries. 95%+ of consumer users (not pros, whose needs are obviously more rarified, and for whom the sky is the limit) are probably fine with 8GB of memory, and it's not something I would recommend them increasing unless they plan to hold onto the computer for more than 5 years.
Once the shared libraries are in memory, memory usage grows really, really slowly for my application set (listed above) on OS X.
I'm not saying that 8 GB will last forever - I'm just saying, as a power user who has zero need for more than 8GB right now, that 8 GB on OS X will be just fine for about 95% of average consumer use. Absolutely would not recommend upgrading an iMac's memory unless you are really certain you are going to hang onto it for more than 5 years - not the best use of $200.
I'm just talking about your average family use; for vertical niches (Video Work, Graphics Design, Heavy Industrial Programs, Databases) - obviously those people will assess their situation and make a decision that is optimized for their circumstances.
Which numbers are you reading for this? The "memory use" total includes lots of irrelevant things like files read once during boot and optimistically cached for later, so you can expect it to be nearly 100% of installed memory at all times.
You're not in a memory pressure situation until you have an actual performance problem or the swap space starts growing.
But if you are having performance problems, I'm pretty sure someone cares deeply about them and would like to know the per-process memory use.
Most importantly, technology/creative professionals that care about the ram and the apple platform will gladly pay the premium for 32gb.
That being said - the overall price considering it includes a 5k screen is pretty damn good.