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32 GB of RAM in a Mac Pro

GothicChess.Com

GothicChess.Com

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 6, 2007
126
0
Philadelphia, PA
Anyone know if Apple plans on expanding the Mac Pro line to handle 32 GB of RAM anytime soon?

I am building this "killer" application that needs lots of RAM.

Thanks if anyone can confirm this speculation, I want to build the program under OS X, would have to make a UNIX flavor just for want of RAM!
 
I don't know if there have been any rumors about it, but I don't think that there is any reason for them to do it any time soon. The current processors won't be able to run current applications by the time that much Ram would be affordable and required for programs. for any current programs I think that the 16GBs is overkill.
 
Yeah, about the only purpose of having that much RAM is if you were crunching some advanced mathematics/ physics problem. For anything else, it's overkill.
That being said, there was a post here about a week ago that claimed that it was possible to use 4GB sticks in the MP.
 
Well, I have this chess-like program and it can announce Mate in 268 moves right now.

Here is what the program looks like:

vortex_gold.gif


For those of you who play chess, you will notice there is "something funny" about the board: it's "too wide." That's because in this cool new chess game, there are 10 columns across, and still 8 in height. Two new chess pieces were added, and all of the other standard chess pieces are still on the board.

One new chess piece moves like a Rook or a Knight on any turn.
The other new piece moves like a Bishop or a Knight on any turn.

Anyway, some of the longest checkmates are already shown here:

http://www.gothicchess.com/javascript_endings.html

For me to go to the next stage, and solve every possible position from any permutation involving 6 pieces, I would need that boatload of RAM.
 
i believe the current mac pro can already support 32GB of RAM. you just have to put in 8 stick of the 4GB

check this thread as well
 
If you are building something like that you really need to be on a different platform than Apple. Do the user interface on Apple if you like, but run the back-end on server class hardware. Applications like these tend to grow and with Apple if you are already on a MP and you need more, like 8 times more. There is nothing as you are already on the top of the line. But if you were running on 4 or 8 CPU Sun server you are running ona "low-end" server and there is room to grow.

One of the things the higher end server class hardware has is "fault tolerance". The Sun equipment will continue to run even with a failed CPU and failed RAM and with a failed disk controller. It will re-configure itself. Also you have multiple power supplys that can be swaped without bringing the system down. Also the Sun stuff is comparably priced to Apple. Sun as a company is very much like Apple. Solaris and Mac OS X share much in common.

Do you really need this much physical RAM? What is the algorithm you are implementing

GothicChess.Com said:
Anyone know if Apple plans on expanding the Mac Pro line to handle 32 GB of RAM anytime soon?

I am building this "killer" application that needs lots of RAM.

Thanks if anyone can confirm this speculation, I want to build the program under OS X, would have to make a UNIX flavor just for want of RAM!
Click to expand...
 
ReanimationLP said:
The only thing I could see using that much RAM is using a good 16GB or so as a big RAM disk for your apps and scratch.
Click to expand...

Actually a big RAM disk for scratch is a very poor use of RAM. Almost always the virtual memory system built into the OS can do a better job of managing RAM.

I guess because this is a Mac forum people here don't think about computing other then desktop applications There is lots of use for 32GB of RAM The first thing I can think of is a DBMS server. The "normal" ratio is to buy about 4GB of RAM for each CPU so a server built with 32GB and 8 CPUS is "balanced". Most DBMSes use the process per client model. So as more clients do queries the number of copies of the DBMS server grows so you really can use a large number of CPUs. 16, 32 and even 64 CPUs is not unheard of for an enterprise class database.

So while there are routine uses for systems with 32GB RAM I question if this application needs it. We don't know because he has not said what it is. My guess is that he doesn't need so much RAM.
 
Wow- I answered my own question. It is possible to get 32 gigs in dual core G5. They have 4 gig chips available at DealRAM.com. They're a bit pricey though. :)
 
Father Jack said:
1 Gb from Crucial is over £100, fitting 16 Gb is about the same price as a Mac pro. :eek:

FJ
Click to expand...

OK so it's 1600 pounds or $3200. the price is nothing compared to the cost to write the application. What does a programer make per hour? Add payrol taxes and overhead. rent for the office space, insurance and so on and you can't get buy for under $100/hour Figure it takes at least 1,000 hours (half a man year) to get even something simple done and you are spending $100K. $3K for Ram is pocket change for a software development project. And believe me you "don't get nothing" for only 0.5 man years of development effort - maybe a prototype, proof of concept demo or rev 1.0 of a very simple application.

Look at some numbers. a very productive team can write about 1000 lines of code per person per month. That is fully debugged and documented and run through QC, a bug tracking system and in configuration control. Of course anyone can type faster but we are talking about production quality delved, non-beta code. Figure $100/hour and 160 hours per month to $16000/1000 means $16 per line. Now count the lines of code in project that are like yours. The PostgreSQL DBMS has about 800,000 lines My telemetry system is at about 100K lines now. You can look at some open source projects and count lines there. Bottom line is that $5K or $10K for a computer is trivial, you don't even see that in the "rolled up" budget. that 1000/month figure assumes a top talent motivated team.
 
32 gigs of RAM in the mac pro is highly probable

the xserve has 8 slots with 4 gigs a chip

the xserve uses the same FB-DIMM's as the mac pro

so once apple supports it, it will be possible

also if you need 32 gigs now get an xserve

but the ram is so ***** expensive
 
Might be better off with an off-location headless Linux server using 32GB of the cheap stuff (Ddr2 ecc reg, not fb-dimms), as those fb-dimms really don't provide any gain in performance and cost an ass and a thigh.
 
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