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Re:AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Clic... by barrkel on Saturday February 25, 2017 @06:02PM (#13734399)
The other day, I was struggling to emulate a Hadoop cluster in a series of VMs on a 16G laptop with zero work being performed - just keeping all the services and Cloudera's management scripts and tools made everything swap everywhere.

VMs are my biggest memory hog, particularly when they are running lots and lots of separate Java processes.

Re:AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Clic... by dpark on Saturday February 25, 2017 @06:11PM (#13734440)
And the problem with your 16GB system was that it didn't support >64GB?
Re:AMD’s $499 Ryzen 7 1800X Beats $1700 i7 6950X with 1-Clic... by barrkel on Saturday February 25, 2017 @07:01PM (#13734713)
The problem with my laptop was that it didn't support >16GB; I'd take more than 64GB if I could have it.

It's usually foolish to say that we don't have need for more X in computing because nothing today warrants more than X; the thing is, if we have more of X, we find uses for it. Most of what we do can trade space for time, or incorporate things in cache hierarchies; and sometimes quantitative change adds up to a qualitative change because new architectural approaches become possible.

If I could have 1TB in my laptop, it would change the way we at my company develop software. In fact we'd rewrite our product to take advantage of that much memory, the case would be overwhelming; we'd introduce a new tier in our architecture for keeping a copy of the customer's working set (typically several GB) in memory. As it is, we rely on the database and its caching; it's OK, but it can't support all the operators we'd like to support.