Intel To Support 128GB of DDR4 on Core 9th Gen Desktop Processors (anandtech.com)

Ian Cutress, writing for AnandTech: One of today's announcements threw up an interesting footnote worthy of further investigation. With its latest products, HP announced that their mainstream desktop platforms would be shipped with up to 32GB of memory, which was further expandable up to 128GB. Intel has confirmed to us, based on new memory entering the market, that there will be an adjustment to the memory support of the latest processors.

Normally mainstream processors only support 64GB, by virtue of two memory channels, two DIMMs per memory channel (2DPC), and the maximum size of a standard consumer UDIMM being 16GB of DDR4, meaning 4x16GB = 64GB. However the launch of two different technologies, both double height double capacity 32GB DDR4 modules from Zadak and G.Skill, as well as new 16Gb DDR4 chips coming from Samsung, means that technically in a consumer system with four memory slots, up to 128GB might be possible.

Comments

Why?

[DarkRookie2]

I mean beyond shits and giggles, is there anything out there that could use 128GB of RAM and even get close to that number.
Or anything in the near future. Next 5-10 years.


Chrome doesn't count. That will eat up all the RAM anyways.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

VMs obviously. Adobe as well.

Re:Why?

[Lord_Byron]

Certainly, with virtualization. Perhaps not mainstream, but my home server is creaking under it's current memory limits if I have the Windows VMs up. Yes, there are other approaches, but this is a valid use for gobs of RAM.

Maybe gaming too? Being able to cache the *entire* game to RAM would seem likely to speed things up, maybe make loading screens a thing of the past.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean beyond shits and giggles, is there anything out there that could use 128GB of RAM and even get close to that number.

Virtual machines ... CAD software ... databases ... rendering software ... huge data sets.

There's a lot of things for which "too much RAM" can never be true.

On a desktop I can burn through 16GB without even trying, and 32GB I can fill without trying that hard.

I can guarantee you, someone somewhere can chew through 128GB of RAM for their specific problem.

Re:Why?

[mi]

is there anything out there that could use 128GB of RAM and even get close to that number.

I'm dealing with 100GB-1TB databases at work on a regular basis — I'm sure, others have encountered even bigger ones. Fitting all — or most — of the dataset into RAM is greatly speeding things up. Indeed, there are database-software packages already (such as, ugh, "memcache"), that must load it all into RAM, offering dramatically-improved speeds in exchange for this requirement.

On the OS level, swap — and the associated complexity of the kernels — is becoming unnecessary in more and more cases. On some of my FreeBSD machines, for example, I'm already compiling the kernel with options NO_SWAPPING.

On the filesystem-level, ZFS — the revolutionary filesystem — can offer much better speed with more RAM. The abundance of RAM is also making its advanced features (like deduplication) practical.

And for a layman's personal computer, editing a 4K video becomes much snappier too, if the the entire (uncompressed) clip fits into RAM.

And then come things like "machine learning" — I'm waiting for a Thunderbird add-on, for example, to automatically sort my incoming e-mail. Not just "spam/not-spam", but all of it, based on the ongoing analysis of how I've been sorting it through the years... For those things to be effective, they need both CPU and memory — continuously...

Other examples — legitimate and otherwise (like Chrome) — abound...

Re:Why?

[jellomizer]

There is an 20/80 rules. 20% of the data is used 80% of the time.
For a Database server of a modest size of 600 gigs. 128 gig ram, would be handy for most of your data requests that are handled. Speeding up the data access on the app.

I happen to do a lot of data processing, the more I can stuff in RAM normally the better, because I don't need to go back and optimize code to handle slower drive reads, or because my OS is thrashing because I gave it too much data.

For home use not so much. My Laptop has 32gigs of RAM and it is way more then I currently need.

Re:Why?

[WilliamGeorge]

Photoscan and other photogrammetry applications, when working with large image sets (1000+ photos) and high quality settings.

After Effects uses RAM to store rendered frames, so increasing from 64 to 128GB means you can have twice as many frames stored in RAM preview at a time.

Video editing with 6K and 8K footage, though usually in those situations you would want a CPU with more cores anyway (so a Core X processor, which can already support 128GB of memory without more dense modules.

That is just what I can think of off the top of my head, and that others in this thread haven't already mentioned.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> On the filesystem-level, ZFS — the revolutionary filesystem — can offer much better speed with more RAM. The abundance of RAM is also making its advanced features (like deduplication) practical.

At scale, ZFS deduplication is a non-starter. The requirements of 5GB/TB are just not workable. I'm in the early investigative stages of a petabyte scale project and will be testing Red Hat's VDO layered on top of ZFS. The deduplication requirements of VDO are 268MB/TB, which means our 480TB storage nodes will be able to have deduplication with approximately 128GB of RAM reserved for deduplication, rather than the 2TB+ that would be required by the ZFS DDT.

On the downside, VDO maxes at 256TB/volume, so we'll be running two volumes per Gluster node.

Enough.

[king neckbeard]

128GB ought to be enough for anybody.

Threadripper

[Weaselmancer]

From this link:

Max Mem 1 TiB

Use Cases

[JBMcB]

Multitrack high-res audio editing. Video editing and compositing. Medium format 48-bit image editing.

Anything needing a few gigabytes of RAM just to load a project will just get faster the more you can buffer stuff into memory.

Re:Chasing AMD taillights

[ZiakII]

You are looking at Server CPUs... Intel supports up to 3.06 TB a CPU.