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Laptops With 128GB of RAM Are Here (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Brace yourself for laptops with 128GB of RAM because they're coming. Today, Lenovo announced its ThinkPad P52, which, along with that massive amount of memory, also features up to 6TB of storage, up to a 4K, 15.6-inch display, an eighth-gen Intel hexacore processor, and an Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics card. The ThinkPad also includes two Thunderbolt three ports, HDMI 2.0, a mini DisplayPort, three USB Type-A ports, a headphone jack, and an Ethernet port. The company hasn't announced pricing yet, but it's likely going to try to compete with Dell's new 128GB-compatible workstation laptops. The Dell workstation laptops in question are the Precision 7730 and 7530, which are billed as "ready for VR" mobile workstations. According to TechRadar, "These again run with either 8th-gen Intel CPUs or Xeon processors, AMD Radeon WX or Nvidia Quadro graphics, and the potential to specify a whopping 128GB of 3200MHz system memory."
People doing CAD, 3D/CGI, Scientific Computing, GPGPU/HighPerformanceComputing use monster workstations every day - Dual Xeon 8, 12 or 16 Core, multiple Nvdia Titan GPUs, 64 to 256GB RAM and so on. That's what you need for today's 3D DCC and CAD design workflows. Anything lower, and everything slows down to a crawl and you don't make your deadlines. These new laptops don't even satisfy what is really needed - at least 8 to 12 CPU cores and room for 2+ powerful GPUs - but will be good enough to get work done on the go. That's the segment they are aimed at - the one that cannot get anything much done on quadcore core i7 CPUs and mobile GPUs.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
On a 17 inch laptop, the difference between 1080HD and 4K is immediately visible. Much smaller and finer details in true 4K videos and games, icons and text with no aliasing whatsoever, and even 1080HD video renders slightly better and sharper on a 4K UHD screen. So the difference is there if you have sharp eyesight. On 15 inch you're pushing things a bit, but even there, 4K video should look sharper overall than at 1080HD.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Lots:
Vagrant.
Virtualbox.
Developer tools.
Photo/video editing.
Sound editing.
A 128 GB machine will be ideal for a developer who has it for his/her daily driver, and who has to show that their code works on some test VM bases via Vagrant. This gets rid of the "it works on my machine, but not in production" type of bugs.
Even if the RAM is not needed, it works as a cache, making I/O faster.
At extremely high DPI you might not need to anti-alias fonts, which tends to make them blurry. Even so I calculated that panel to be only 280 DPI. That's nice but it's not the extreme end of things, and in the ball park of the early Retina displays.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Composers who use large orchestral sample libraries, for instance.
640k is actually a lot of storage, and enough for most (even modern) application to run their core logic. What is filling most of the RAM today is things like pictures, large data sets prefetched data. A lot of the stuff in active RAM may never be used in the application. Being that Unicode data for hello world uses two bytes for character in generals makes strings 50% inefficient.
For the time where screen resolutions were 320x200 4 color, getting data from a disk took minutes. 640k was enough for anyone. But that was for the programs of the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.