Comment by liendolucas
1 hour ago
Is it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM?
Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments?
For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.
I doubt that most computer users have more than 16GB of RAM in their systems. There are plenty of users on 8GB systems and some still on 4GB. Even when considering bloated Web apps, 8GB of RAM is passable and 16GB is plenty.
I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.
Actually I was using a laptop with 16GB around 2013 already. That's 13 years ago. Memory requirements kind of stagnated after that. Obviously, LLMs are driving up memory needs now.
I have a 48GB development machine which is nice if you are running IDEs, backend stuff via docker, etc. And even just having a bunch of RAM there for file caching helps keep things fast.
Use cases besides software development exist. Even relatively simple video editing can easily run past 16GB, and so can photo editing if you're working with more than a few high-resolution images at once. On the consumer side, YouTube in any Chromium-based browser with an ad blocker runs its memory usage up to 5GB+ if the tab's open too long. Add a couple of these use cases together, and you just need more RAM.