I’ve been spec’ing out a new desktop and am intrigued by something I’m not sure I’ve seen before. It’s actually possible to get a computer with too much RAM now. 32GB is not really high-end, or expensive, and yet I can’t really think of any consumer/business application that would use that. Programs like photoshop or video editing or scientific engineering software have pretty much infinite appetites, so those programs would really be a question of diminishing returns.
As for me, I could literally put an an entire Windows 7 virtual machine on a RAM disk* with a ton of code, some decent-sized databases, and give that VM 4-8GB of RAM, and still have physical memory to spare. That said, I’m certainly going to get (at least) 32 because it’s a cheap upgrade from 8 or 16, so if I find a use for it, I’ll report back.
Making claims about the future can haunt you forever, even if you didn’t actually say it, so I’m not saying that we’ll never need 32GB, of there will ever actually be such a thing as “too much RAM” but I’m curious how long it will be until we do.
*You might think that the RAM disk is dead with the availability of SSD, but RAM is still dramatically (50-100x) faster than even high-end SSDs like Fusion-io, thanks to the limitations of the SATA or PCI bus.