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."

Comments

Re:For what use?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to ask, it ain't for you.

Apple, have courage

[onyxruby]

Dear Apple,

Please have some courage and release a pro version of your laptop. If IBM and Dell can do this, you can do the same. It's the year 2018, 16 GB should be a base, not the maximum.

Re:Apple, have courage

[Graymalkin]

Just because I need a portable computer, doesn't mean I need to sit at a cafe all day.

Wanting good battery life is not about sitting in a cafe all day. I want a portable computer that I can use places away from my office/desk for long periods of time without hunting for a power outlet. I also want to use my laptop and not have it throttle way down on the battery. It would also really nice for it to be light so it doesn't weigh down my bag.

Portables have aspects with inverse proportions. Intel dropping the ball after Skylake has meant any manufacturers wanting high performance parts in a small envelope can't pack a lot of RAM unless they sacrifice battery life by using much higher power draw DDR4.

A higher power draw means lower battery life (for the same sized battery) and likely a lot of thermal throttling issues. DDR4 uses several times as much power as LPDDR3E used in the MacBook lines. Even if you are willing to sacrifice the battery life, the thermals would be a major issue even on AC power. The higher power RAM/controller would eat up the thermal budget for the CPU meaning it would enter TurboBoost mode less often or worst case actually stay throttled down.

The ThinkPad in the story is a brick. This means thermals and battery life probably aren't major concerns. From the looks of it actual portability isn't much of a concern either.

Re:For what use?

[gameboyhippo]

I felt the same when 1G ram became a thing...

Great!

[mark_reh]

I'll buy one for $300 in about 5 years!

Re:For what use?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any use for something like this, either personally, or in my work. What's the point of something like this? What kind of software needs this kind of juice?

Well you see, last year all the people wanting to learn to work with and code for massively parallel systems would throw together a bunch of nodes into a cluster, typically something cheap like Raspberry Pi or Intel NUCs.

Their accomplishments get posted to Slashdot, and technology haters all came out to say what they did was stupid, just virtualize it!

Now hardware comes out with the resources to virtualize 128 nodes at 1GB ram each, and naturally the same people say that is just as stupid.

I presume because you personally don't use or run such systems, due to your opening comments, you feel the rest of the world doesn't need such things to exist.

You'd probably live a much happier and less confusing life if you could only grasp the concept that no one else is exactly like you.
You might also want to do something about the person with a gun to your head forcing you to purchase one of these things you don't want. Do you need our help? That's the only reason I can think of that would make it so impossible for you to just not buy the things you don't want to buy...

6-row keyboard

[XanC]

Still waiting them out on my x220, waiting for real keyboards to return.

Re:For what use?

[dgatwood]

Sounds to me like the CAD and modeling people need to optimize their shit.

Alternatively, this seems like a great use for a thin client, i.e. use your laptop to VNC into a beefier computer.

Re:For what use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let me know how well that works for you from a job site where you may not always have useful cell or wifi due to conditions of the site.

Re: CAD, 3D CG, Scientific, GPGPU, HPC Needs It

[exomondo]

Why are people doing CAD, etc on laptops?

Because they want/need portable workstations.

Also I was doing CAD on workstations with 8gb of ram. You do not need 128gb of ram to run cad programs.

There were a lot of people doing CAD on workstations with 1mb of RAM too, therefore 8gb is massive overkill? You'd think that 640k Bill Gates quote has had enough exposure that people would have got the point of it by now, obviously not.

Needing power sucking CPUs and multiple GPUs, this laptop does not solve that problem.

They use desktop-grade CPUs rather than low-power portable ones and if you really need it you can expand the GPU capability with an eGPU for those times that you need it.

So again, what's the point?

Oh no you can buy a laptop with 128GB of RAM, what a terrible thing! What's the point of complaining about it? If you don't need it don't buy it, if nobody needs it nobody will buy and it will go away and you can stop whining about the existence of something you don't want or need.

Re: CAD, 3D CG, Scientific, GPGPU, HPC Needs It

[Anonymous Coward]

its a sad state of affairs when anythning new in technology is greeted with an adenoidal whining of "I dont need this so what's the point?"