Does it though? I made another comment but for home use I can't even max out 64 GBs.
The only thing I can think of that'd ever max out my RAM is some sort of training task (even though I'd expect to run out of VRAM first). But those are the kinds of tasks that do best on distributed systems since you don't really need to care about them, just spin it up, run your task, and tear it back down
Google recommends 64GiB to build the Android kernel. That's a thing you could technically do at home. And if you want to do anything else at the same time, you're gonna need to go to 128.
Funny you should say that... my entire career has been built on embedded Android and I've built a lot of images from "scratch" (or as close as you get with random SoC supplier provided garbage tacked on)
The first time I built an AOSP image from scratch was on some dinky office workstation that had been freshly upgraded with a whopping 16GBs so you wouldn't come back in the next morning to a random OOM
These days I get to open a PR and some random monster of a machine on a build farm does the heavy lifting, but I can still say from a lot of experience that 64GB is truly more than plenty for Android OS builds and definitely won't be what keeps you from doing other stuff... IO and CPU usage might make it an interesting proposition, but not RAM.
When Google says 64GB it's for the whole machine: the build process will use a lot of it when configured properly, but not so much that you can't run anything else
(Also again, Android builds are a perfect example of where a remote machine pays off in spades. The spin up is such a small fraction of what's needed you don't have to start messing with containerization if you don't want to, and you can get access to some insanely large instance for a few hours then stop paying for it as soon as it's done.
It just seems unlikely to have a task that warrants that much RAM that isn't just about throwing resources at an otherwise "stateless" task that's a great match for cloud compute)
There are various analytic APIs/libraries that will map data files into memory when there is surplus RAM available. That can really speed up processes which would otherwise be IO bound.
> The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit. It doesn’t feel like we’ve budged meaningfully here for years. Or is that just me?
Then less than 3 comments in somehow it became we start justifying 256 GBs of RAM?
256 GBs of RAM can be useful in some cases, on some computers, in some places, but that's not really a meaningful inference? 1TB of RAM can be useful depending on the workload, any given number could be.
The question is can it be useful for anything even vaguely resembling personal computing, and the answer is for all intents and purposes: No. It's not.
You're getting upset and going all caps over your own misunderstanding....
> The general public isn’t asking for a hundred gigs, but I’d love to see the baseline rise up a bit. It doesn’t feel like we’ve budged meaningfully here for years. Or is that just me?
This was the comment that kicked off the thread. Some people felt 32 GBs was the new baseline, and then out of left field comes _256 GBs_
For any amount of RAM, someone somewhere will be able to use it. But that's the kind of deep observation I expect from a toddler.
If we're going past kiddie pool deep observations of plain fact, no, the baseline wouldn't be anywhere near 256 GBs of RAM based on how people use computers.
(And before you attack me for your own poor understanding of language again: People as in the human collective. "People don't need" is not the same as "no one needs".)
I didn't. At least, not to those of us who can deal with some flexibility in interpreting written communication, and use a little tool called context.
But then again, there are definitely people out there who need every. single. nuance. of the most basic statement spelled out for them, as if they're biological GPT-3 endpoint (and this site certainly does feel like it's drowning in those people these days) but I don't write comments for them.
Instead I write comments for people who are interested in actual conversation over browbeating everyone in site because they assumed the most useless interpretation of your statement was the correct one.
The only thing I can think of that'd ever max out my RAM is some sort of training task (even though I'd expect to run out of VRAM first). But those are the kinds of tasks that do best on distributed systems since you don't really need to care about them, just spin it up, run your task, and tear it back down