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MacBook Pro 2012 32 GB Memory?
- Thread starter 53kyle
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Try opening a 20GB xml file in any text-editor without having 32GB RAM. Vim - the best editor for opening huge text files - will be stuck on creating a giant swap file. As most text editors open the entire file on RAM, you need as much RAM as you can buy and your hardware can handle for opening those big files.
Also, if you use a bunch of VMs, RAM is always welcome.
If you're creating 20GB xml files, then your company should buy the macbook for you. Also, why aren't you parsing your xml files into something more manageable?
Yeah but how common is it for people to have to open a 20GB xml file. A few extreme cases doesn't mean people need it. In the case of that type of work, and I cant even imagine a 20GB xml file, most people would probably use a desktop.
It's not a company... I'm a graduate student. Of course I could split the xml files into smaller files, but it's an additional work I wouldn't need doing if I had more RAM. Also, indexing these files in RAM is way faster than storing in SSD/HDD.
I agree that most users wouldn't need more than 4GB of RAM and a SSD... 8GB is kind of an exotic requirement these days, but once you need making simulation/indexing/information retrieval work, the more RAM you have, the better. That's why "Pro" Macbooks should provide configuration options with the state-of-the-art volatile memory and storage (like 32GB RAM in two slots and 1TB SSD).
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I think laptops are the new desktops. You can do your work in any place as a Café, university, home, girlfriend's home and so on. Of course you could set up a VPN for acessing your powerful desktop in any place. It's always an option, but not feasible to me because of bandwidth problems I can face outside home.
i've been getting by pretty well on 16gb, but i can still eat it all up with not too much effort in after effects. and when i was only running 8gb, things locked up regularly.
people can debate whats happening under the hood until the cows come home, but from real world experience i know for a fact more ram ALWAYS helps with the work i do.
its just funny because i've seen this "you'll never need that much" argument over and over, at 4gb, 8gb, 16gb. 32 isn't going to be any different. i keep wondering if its coming from people who buy macbook pros as coffee shop status symbols...
people can debate whats happening under the hood until the cows come home, but from real world experience i know for a fact more ram ALWAYS helps with the work i do.
its just funny because i've seen this "you'll never need that much" argument over and over, at 4gb, 8gb, 16gb. 32 isn't going to be any different. i keep wondering if its coming from people who buy macbook pros as coffee shop status symbols...
I completely understand that some people can take advantage of it. I just think that the majority do not. Until a good portion of people cant take advantage of it, I believe you wont see the increase.
Would it be nice to be able to configure that high? Of course it would. No one can argue against having options. The thing is... how much does it cost a company to be able to provide extra configurations for the select few people that need it? The companies bottom line will always dictate what they provide.
I am sure that eventually the need for 32 will be there. Just like you said above... we needed 4 then 8 ... that's kind of where it stops though. There are still a lot of people that probably wont even use 8 yet. Professionals and gamers may dip into the 16 now. Very few people will dip into 32.
If you need to edit 20GB xml files (really, why would you ever need to do this, its just so wrong on so many levels???), how about using/writing an editor which does NOT preload the entire file into memory? It is absolutely hilarious how people continue to bring in such absurd cases to 'prove' their point.----------
I am sure that by the time we realistically need 32GB in a average laptop, the technology to have it will exist. Right now, the physical space and power usage tradeoff is too
significant to justify its installation in a 'normal' notebook.Those rare professionals users which require 32GB RAM in a laptop can choose one of specialised workstations which support such configurations.
One thing's for certain, we can always count on people on this forum to tell others what they really need.
I have 16GB and have used nearly all of it when using FCPX+Compressor, Photoshop, etc. Right now I have about 5GB of pageouts. Do I need 32GB? No, I've been doing fine with 16GB but the option of upgrading to 32GB would be nice. Do I need 16GB? Not ALL the time, but I do need it.
It's also not up to Apple to make it happen, at least for the cMBP. There just aren't any 16GB SODIMMs yet.
One thing's for sure, though. We don't need people telling us what we REALLY need or lumping everyone together. "People barely use 8GB, who needs 16GB let alone 32GB?!" Plenty of people can make use of it, that wasn't the point of this thread. It's pretty rude of people to assume they know what someone else needs, but hey that's MR for you.
I have 16GB and have used nearly all of it when using FCPX+Compressor, Photoshop, etc. Right now I have about 5GB of pageouts. Do I need 32GB? No, I've been doing fine with 16GB but the option of upgrading to 32GB would be nice. Do I need 16GB? Not ALL the time, but I do need it.
It's also not up to Apple to make it happen, at least for the cMBP. There just aren't any 16GB SODIMMs yet.
One thing's for sure, though. We don't need people telling us what we REALLY need or lumping everyone together. "People barely use 8GB, who needs 16GB let alone 32GB?!" Plenty of people can make use of it, that wasn't the point of this thread. It's pretty rude of people to assume they know what someone else needs, but hey that's MR for you.
You overestimate the needs of games. The only game I know of which claims more than 8GB is Battlefield4, which is not even released yet (released game RAM usage might decrease). Virtually each currently released demanding PC game will see no improvement when going from 4Gb to 8GB.
The big xml file is just an example, maybe the most absurd I could give, but you can think of many other situations, like working with big graphs where you can store traversed paths for improved results. You can also work with tons of vectors without needing to rely on swap. Well... I can mention a lot of professional and scientific applications where you can be benefited with a lot of RAM.
User-replaceable RAM is nice because you can keep your environment (without paying more for processing power you don't need or losing time migrating your configurations and apps to another machine). I expect that 2012 standard Macbooks will support 64GB some day. And for sure some people will find this upgrade useful instead of buying a new machine.
Eh maybe so, but I have played some MMOs that have maxed out my 8 gig desktop. Its especially true when they have memory leaks. Going from 4 to 8 will surely increase some performance. Just playing ToR, I use 50% of my ram. That would be 4 gigs. I also sometimes run stuff in the background like music, fraps, voip software and things of the sort. Sometimes I use multi monitor so that I can game on one screen and do other stuff on the other. Kind of why I said MAY dip into 16 now. I know that most people barely use the 8 gigs.
Also, I never owned a mac before so I am unsure about memory when it comes to using something like parallels to use windows while in OSX.
for sure, i'm not arguing against the fact that it takes a while to become practical and mainstream, just against the people who say "nobody needs that!"
although i will say its kinda sad that macbook pro has been demoted to "average laptop" since i originally got into apple because it was *the* system of choice for people in my field (and still is for the most part, but it sounds like its being aimed more and more at the casual user).
lastly, coming from a 2011 macbook pro and looking to upgrade in 2014, this will actually be the FIRST time I have ever upgraded a computer and not had a ram increase.
I think software is in part what drives technology. It works both ways really but I think of it like this....
Software pushes the boundaries of GPUs. GPUs get better. Software pushes the boundaries of CPUs. CPUs get better. Software isn't really pushing the size of RAM yet. When it did RAM got bigger and faster. RAM is still getting faster and probably smaller too, but the size boundary isn't really being pushed yet. For some people yes, but for most no.
I work with data mining on daily basis and I have also worked with some large databases on my old 4GB machine (like the google N-Gram corpus which consists of around 300GB compressed text tables). If you need high performance with such large data sets, a laptop is wrong tool to begin with. There are specialised machines and systems for that.
You must be kidding. They will never support more then 16GB simply because larger SODIMM DDR3 modules do not exist and never will. Not to mention other limitations.
Just so wrong. I work on ERP systems and editing a 2GB file - WTF does that. The system might generate a 1GB xml file - if someone did not do the right edits - but we're not manually editing it. If anything, we might use the file to stage a data load. Even editing a 100MB file... just insane.
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Never say never. I recall a certain billionaire saying no one will ever need more the 64Megs of ram.
Technology evolves, but like you implied, why build a component when there's nothing to support it(16MB sticks) or use it.
The most memory/cpu intensive apps these days are games. Anything that requires so much is normally an enterprise-class machine - desktop.
The rest are YT video makers.
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Oh, please don't misunderstand me. I was simply responding to the claim that a 2012 MBP could be equipped with 64GB RAM in 'the future'. So far, industry failed to delve higher-density DDR3 RAM chips, and as it is is already transitioning to DDR4 and starts practical experimentation with next-gen RAM like the HMC, I very much doubt that we will even see any 16GB DDR3 modules at all. This thread has an interesting discussion on the topic. Note - it was a year ago, and DDR3 capacity didn't really change since then.
I have no doubt that future computers and applications will require more and more RAM. But before that, the memory speed bottleneck must be solved. Current HMC samples deliver 160GB/s - compare this to DDR3 speeds! I would happily give away the 16GB RAM in my rMBP if I could have 4GB of that stuff
Oh, please don't misunderstand me. I was simply responding to the claim that a 2012 MBP could be equipped with 64GB RAM in 'the future'. So far, industry failed to delve higher-density DDR3 RAM chips, and as it is is already transitioning to DDR4 and starts practical experimentation with next-gen RAM like the HMC, I very much doubt that we will even see any 16GB DDR3 modules at all. This thread has an interesting discussion on the topic. Note - it was a year ago, and DDR3 capacity didn't really change since then.
I have no doubt that future computers and applications will require more and more RAM. But before that, the memory speed bottleneck must be solved. Current HMC samples deliver 160GB/s - compare this to DDR3 speeds! I would happily give away the 16GB RAM in my rMBP if I could have 4GB of that stuff
I understand now.
No, you don't. You "recall" him "saying" that, but what he "said" was that 640 Kb would be enough for everyone, and of course the entire quote is an urban legend.
I just showed this to my engineer friend and we had a good laugh, so thanks for that. I don't know where to start in addressing your ignorance. Theoretically, a computer could use an infinite amount of memory and will start paging out at whatever the capacity is. In practice, there are few people who would see a quantifiable difference going from 8GB of RAM to 16GB and even fewer who would see a difference between 16GB and 32GB (yet).
Additionally, DDR4 won't be supported in consumer CPUs until Skylake. This has been confirmed MULTIPLE times. It will be supported first by Haswell-E CPUs.
So in my case, performing research is an absurd case now?
Just because you don't have a need for more ram doesn't mean that I don't...
16 GB modules have arrived & looks like it could work for MBP! See:
http://www.intelligentmemory.com/dram-modules/ddr3-so-dimm/
http://www.intelligentmemory.com/dram-modules/ddr3-so-dimm/
Apple systems all use Intel processors. All systems with Intel processors use a compiled pieces of software called the "Memory Reference Code" (short MRC) which has the job to initialize the memory, set the registers in the CPU.
This MRC code is part of the BIOS or EFI and is one of the first software-codes executed when switching on the computer.
Intel MRC software code can only identify DRAM chips with a capacity of up to 4 Gigabit per chip. But a 16GB memory UDIMM or SO-DIMM module must use 8 Gigabit chips, which the MRC can currently not handle.
It would theoretically be a very simple change to add the support for 8 Gigabit chips into the MRC, then compile a new BIOS or EFI and all systems with Intel CPUs could run with 16GB UDIMM/SO-DIMM modules.
The problem is that Intel does not plan to do this change. And as the software is compiled somewhere inside the BIOS/EFI, it is very difficult to change or patch it. Additionally, it requires the documentation of the Intel CPU registers of the internal memory controller. This is confidential stuff and I have not met anybody who got these documents.
Or do we have anybody here who is able to do that job? I can help with my knowledge of row/column/bank and timing settings.
Regards,
Thorsten
You obviously don't run VMware! If Apple sold a laptop that could have 64GB or 128GB I would buy it. I do a lot of prototyping work that requires loads of VM's and memory is the main limiting factor for me. I have 64GB in my Mac Pro and that's just about enough for now - I'll, upgrade to 128GB next year because my work will dictate it.
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I hit the 16GB limit every day when building prototypes in VMware, and no I haven't given the VM's too much RAM, if anything they don't have enough - ESXi hosts with 2GB, NAS VM's with 512MB. I just need a lot of VM's. Yes I would like to be able to do this on a desktop (and I do with my nMP), but I'm not always at home I need to work at customer sites too, and my work starts before any kit is actually ordered so there's not point asking for 'test servers' as they don't exist at that point.