[X4U] RAM Memory - What's the max?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 11:16 PM -0500 7/20/07, Ed Gould wrote:
>To take this off on a slightly different tangent....
>
>I was in my doctors office today and I brought reading material (yea 
>I know) a MACZONE catalog. I was looking through the server 
>offerings and was struck that none of the MACS (in the catalog) 
>offered anything about 32G (max ram). The one or 2 INTEL server 
>machines offered 128G max ram (although most were 64G).
>
>That got me to wonder as to why Apple doesn't seem to offer 128G (at 
>least) max ram ?

My guess is a mixture of the following; target audience, how much it 
would cost to build a system capable of holding 128GB RAM, and the 
types of applications typically run on a Mac.  Another thing is, as 
you've pointed out these are servers.  They're going to be targeted 
at things such as running ultra large databases, jobs where you need 
to buffer massive amounts of data in memory before transferring them, 
or some kind of scientific or industrial computing.  The typical 
business doesn't need machines with 128GB of RAM.

>I have a simple desktop system but use lots of ram and still page 
>quite a bit. I would like to bump it up to 64G but IIRC the max I 
>can have is 16. Why does Apple seeming limit the ram on their 
>systems?

You want 64GB of RAM in your Desktop system?!?!  OK, recently I went 
from 3.5GB to 5.5GB on my G5 2x2, and even someone that is as RAM 
happy as I am finds that I do quite nicely at 5.5GB.  What on earth 
are you running that you need that much RAM?  Some kind of massive 
simulations?  I'm curious to know, why anyone would need 64GB of RAM 
on their desktop at this point.

BTW, yes, the max currently is 16GB RAM on the Mac Pro's.

		Zane



-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
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