Want a PC With 192 GB of RAM?

ericatcw writes "Do you love the smooth, silky performance of a multi-core PC loaded to the gills with the fastest RAM? Take a look at Dell's new Precision T7500 desktop. According to Computerworld, the T7500 will come with 12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM for a total of 192 GB. Dell's not the only one — Lenovo, Cisco (with blade servers reportedly up to 384 GB in memory) and Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM. But beware! Despite the depressed DRAM market, loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more."

Comments

Got that?

[qoncept]

loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more

Uhh, yeah. Try 1000-fold! You know, since we're just making things up.

While we're at it.. I love when people say "Up to 10x OR MORE!" Like, anywhere from 0 to infinity. Nice.

Re:Got that?

[Fujisawa Sensei]

I like to run a 64-bit version of Python and make a really big list. Or, you can run Java programs (for a while) with GC disabled.

But Windows will still push the Java app out to the swap file, and load all the Microsoft apps installed on your system into memory, just in case you want them.

Re:Got that?

[Fishbulb]

Video editing.

Hollywood will load up on these systems.

24GB is not 192GB

[wjh31]

having just checked, DDR3 PC10600 only comes in 2GB at th moment, and even server sticks dont easily come in 16GB modules

I dont see 8x capacity reaching consummers anytime soon anyway. This sorta thing is just silly, if you have enough money this has been available for ages, for the consumer this is still a long way off

Re:Wow!

[gandhi_2]

Why is there not a "+1 Oh, Snap!" mod?

What Intel giveth...

[hwyhobo]

...Microsoft shall taketh away.

Re:This shall do

[eebra82]

Why are people still modding these comments as funny? Granted, Vista required quite a bit of power on the day of its release, but performance has since then improved and new hardware is more than capable of handling Vista.

I bought a medium range computer a year and a half ago and it runs Vista as fast as XP.

I see you're not running Eclipse

[Nicolas MONNET]

Eclipse + VMWare ... you'll love every bit above 4G.

Re:I see you're not running Eclipse

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly use Eclipse and VMware server to test on different platforms and to test networking, an often have 10-20 tabs open in firefox, and I still have a little ram to spare. BTW - firefox is the biggest in ram out of all of those programs.

Please ban the word "leverage"

[draevil]

"Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel's new Nehalem architecture"

Please tell me I'm not the only one that cringed at this example of newspeak? The word is *use*. "Apple are bringing out computers that **use** Intel's new Nehalem architecture".

The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).

Besides all that the topic is pointless since everyone knows we won't need more than 640K. ;)

Re:Please ban the word "leverage"

[SlashDotDotDot]

The sentence isn't made any more profound, important or meaningful - no extra information is conveyed - by using faddish terms like "leverage"; designed exclusively to make MBAs sound like they have something to contribute (they usually don't).

Normally I'd agree with you on this sort of thing, but I don't think "leverage" and "use" are equivalent here. To me, "leverage" implies that they are taking advantage of a tool that applies more force than some other, simpler, tool. Metaphorically, this is exactly the point they are making--Nehalem can do more than its predecessors, and Apple is using that advantage. This seems like a case where reasonable people could disagree.

No such thing as too "Much RAM"

[Fujisawa Sensei]

But, will they sell me an application that can use that much RAM? I'm fresh out.

No point having that much gas if I've no car to put it in...

Some of was want more RAM than we will ever use. If I'm using all the available RAM on my system, then I don't have enough.

Re:This shall do

[Anonymous Coward]

Also it might be handy for doing a lot of heavy Hi-Def video editing without thrashing the hard disk. Or perhaps rendering for animation with a metric butt-ton of high res mapped textures and high quality HDRI to boot. It would be nice to not hit virtual-mem with the associated slow down and lag or get those out-of-memory errors.

Re:1st PC

[Glonoinha]

Yea, you kids and your fancy limitless random access memory and direct access storage devices.

When I was a kid my first PC had 5000 bytes of RAM, of which only 3500 were available for user applications (the remaining 1500 bytes reserved for the OS.) The screen showed 22 characters across and 23 characters down, each character as big as your thumb. It used 16 different colors, all 16 of which were ugly. If we wanted graphics we had to sacrifice a few characters from the alphabet and remap the 8x8 pixel character map into whatever graphic we wanted. And finally, after only having it a few months we got a tape drive to save our programs (so we didn't have to type them in each time we shut off the computer.) It took 15 minutes to load a single program from tape.
And we were THANKFUL!

And no marking this funny. It would be hilarious, if it weren't true. But I'm serious as a heart attack. Made a helicopter game on that machine once, cost me half my alphabet!