64GB is what you need to run some decent quantized mid-sized LLMs locally…with unified memory on Apple silicon. Should be standard, that would open up a lot if new applications. Incidentally, even high DPI monitors aren’t standard yet for non-mobile devices. Sad how slowly things move.
The Steam Hardware Survey is an incredibly valuable resource, what with it being freely-available, constantly updated, and sourced from a population that makes its sampling biases generally easy to identify and understand. It and the Backblaze hard drive data are almost unique in how they provide real, large-scale data about computer hardware.
Recently I asked for my software developer colleage to be bought a 24 GB Macbook Air instead of 16 GB, and boss came back with "not everyone needs a super-big machine like yours Jamie!".
They seriously spent contractor time investigating whether 16 GB was "enough" to get by for our app development, for a price difference on one laptop (second hand) that was negligible compared with cost of my colleage's time.
When I was using 16 GB I regularly had to watch the spinning beachball waiting for tasks due to memory pressure. Between browsers and VMs, it was nowhere near enough for how I worked. So I knew why I was asking, and I knew the price difference was so small for the company, that it was a no-brainer. I gave justifications but it was seen as over-indulgent.
I mean I also feel like 16GB should be more than enough for what I do (web dev). But bottom line is it isn't. I guess the people making these decisions should try building and running their app locally themselves...
Not for low power applications
64GB is what you need to run some decent quantized mid-sized LLMs locally…with unified memory on Apple silicon. Should be standard, that would open up a lot if new applications. Incidentally, even high DPI monitors aren’t standard yet for non-mobile devices. Sad how slowly things move.
Are there aggregations of some accessible telemetry from a widely used application that reveal what is most common today?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho
The Steam Hardware Survey is an incredibly valuable resource, what with it being freely-available, constantly updated, and sourced from a population that makes its sampling biases generally easy to identify and understand. It and the Backblaze hard drive data are almost unique in how they provide real, large-scale data about computer hardware.
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Thanks, 35.15% on 32GB as well, getting there
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I asked my company to give me 32 GB RAM, then old boomer said why I need so much of RAM. They were asking whether I am building a rocket....
I've had that happen twice!
Recently I asked for my software developer colleage to be bought a 24 GB Macbook Air instead of 16 GB, and boss came back with "not everyone needs a super-big machine like yours Jamie!".
They seriously spent contractor time investigating whether 16 GB was "enough" to get by for our app development, for a price difference on one laptop (second hand) that was negligible compared with cost of my colleage's time.
When I was using 16 GB I regularly had to watch the spinning beachball waiting for tasks due to memory pressure. Between browsers and VMs, it was nowhere near enough for how I worked. So I knew why I was asking, and I knew the price difference was so small for the company, that it was a no-brainer. I gave justifications but it was seen as over-indulgent.
I mean I also feel like 16GB should be more than enough for what I do (web dev). But bottom line is it isn't. I guess the people making these decisions should try building and running their app locally themselves...
A rocket can run on 32 KB of RAM. It's web browsers that take all the RAM. (At least for normal users, that don't run neural networks locally.)
16GB has been the new minimum for under a year. Give it some more time /s