Comment by nicoburns
12 hours ago
> datasets that often fit entirely in RAM.
Yep, and a lot more datasets fit entirely into RAM now. Ignoring the recent price spikes for a moment, 128GB of RAM in a laptop is entirely achievable and not even the limit of what is possible. That was a pipe dream in 2014 when computers with only 4GB were still common. And of course for servers the max RAM is much higher, and in a lot of scenarios streaming data off a fast local SSD may be almost as good.
Oldie-but-goldy:
https://yourdatafitsinram.net/
I have actually worked in a company as a consultant data guy in a non technical team, I had a 128 GB PC 10 years back, and did everything with open source R then, and it worked ! The others thought it was wizardry
You don't really need to ignore the price spikes even. You can still buy more than 128Gb RAM on a machine with the $5k from one of the months.