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Any chance at 32GB ram option in refresh?
- Thread starter dalupus
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There are enough valid use cases for 32GB. The problem is you won't see it in a macbook pro prior to DDR4, and Apple won't offer it for some time beyond that. The current chipsets support 32GB, but the only way to get that right now is with a notebook that supports 4 sodimms. I don't think Apple will go that route until it falls somewhere in the $200-400 range as an upgrade, which may be some time. We're stuck with soldered memory at this point, which means a lot of logic board area. Without higher densities, they won't do it at all.
Current quad cores are enough to run multiple VMs. However, you do run out of ram very quickly. Sometimes before you run out of CPU power.
How many are you running at a time and how much RAM are you allocating to them?
If you need it now, the ThinkPad W540 is a good choice. I have had 32GB in my ThinkPad W520 for nearly two years and run ESXi nested on it. I find the SSD can mask swapping in some cases to be acceptable if swapping is needed.
I missed this one earlier. You saw that they lay it out flat right? Even sticking with what they have now, it would involve more logic board area. Beyond that they've never gone past a 2 sodimm notebook. Some people spend a lot to max that, but that's as far as they go.
I'd say quite close to zero. There are no (and will never be) DDR3 modules with high enough density - so to give 32Gb Apple would need to build in twice as many RAM chips. I very much doubt there is any room on the logic board to accommodate this.
P.S. As has been pointed out below, the appropriate chips are actually entering production now. So please ignore my above statement.
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You are using the wrong tool for the job
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I thought I had read in a few places that 16gb so-dims were starting to hit the market. Oh well. I'll probably just throw my vm's onto a windows box and do remote access of them I guess.
have 1 windows 8 vm on full time that gets 1.5 GB or ram and usually 2 or 3 1gb vm's
But I find that vmware fusion uses far more memory than what I allocate to the vm's
You are correct and I admit to being mistaken! I just didn't think that we would ever see those modules on the market, as companies were struggling to design them for at least two years now. However, it still looks quite grim, as these modules do not seem to have entered production yet, will probably be too expensive and overall, seem to be unsupported by Intel CPU's (according to http://www.anandtech.com/show/7742/im-intelligent-memory-to-release-16gb-unregistered-ddr3-modules )
Agreed. If you need 32 Gigs of RAM, you get a Mac Pro or a windows machine. At least for next couple of years it seems.
If you need 32 Gb and can get by with a Windows machine I would suggest the Asus G750 series. I had one before I sold it to buy my late 2013 rMBP. I had 2 1TB Samsung ssd's and 32 GB of Ram. It was a beast, and if it wasn't for some bugs that early adopters deal with I probably would have kept it. But a few early bugs and I got turned off of it and decided to go back to a Mac. It was a great machine, big, but awesome and more power than I ever needed. All I ever used it for was some simple AutoCad. But if it can take 32 GB, that's what I wanted to put in it. And with 2 hard drive bays, why not 2 ssd's. But after the announcement for the new rMBP's I had made up my mind to sell it and jump ship. But if you need the power, it had it, and more.
Victor
Victor
well I need to stay semi-mobile.
I'll probably just throw a wintel box up at the house and use it as a vmware server instead of running the vm's locally.
Then just use go2mypc or something to access it.
I definitely will never go back to a non-retina screen laptop. That is one of those things that once you get used to it, there is no going back.
I usually agree with you on the unevenly yellowish screens issue, but in this case, it's none of my/your/our business what someone will do with 32GB RAM. This RAM capacity can be used in tons of scientific applications. I can use all the RAM I have available through language processing algorithms. Actually it's annoying writing routines just to optimize ram swap. If I had 32GB it would be less of a concern. 64GB and 128GB would be even better. With 128GB maybe I wouldn't need to worry about swapping. If you're an academic in computer science, you will always use the maximum ram you have available. I can easily imagine 1TB of ram in use. This makes your research work easier, since you don't need spending time on optimizing code for swapping and keeping your cpu always working at full load. More ram means results coming sooner since you spend less time writing memory management routines into your code.
Yes 16 GB
Right now:
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s99/...62cf97-dc19-4cd3-942b-890d6871f9eb/skitch.png
But I have just started for the day. Only 1 VM open
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Yeah actually I am a graduate CS student as well which I why I need to stay somewhat mobile. I do run into memory issues with AI/ML programs at times when processing large datasets, but luckily I can usually just offload the work to the department machines.
I will admit, 32GB sometimes sounds too little. I emulate entire environments on my laptop from the multiple HyperV Clusters complete with multiple VM's running inside VM's and the SAN that they connect t and it's important having a lot of ram.