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.
It's interesting how you can practically tell how many people have a specific processor nowadays (12 core = 5900,7900,9900x, 14 core = i5 14600k, 245, 20 core = i7 etc)
The user (or bot) doesn't have to provide the hardware information, but does have to provide consent for that information to be sent to Valve. Bots have no strong reason to prefer "yes" or "no", but if you have to implement code to handle that dialog box, answering "yes" might be seen as the more human-like behavior.
I believe most consumer CPUs only have 2 memory channels w/ 1 memory controller so unless they're using 64GB UDIMMs (which I believe do exist as of this year) then gamers seem limited to 64GB total ram (2x32GB) unless they want to drop their ram frequency.
For example a 9950x3d officially supports 2 sticks at DDR5-5600 but 4 sticks at only DDR5-3600. [1]
I had a friend run into this issue on AM5 when he was trying to use 4x32GB DDR5 on his gaming PC.
There have been 48GB dual-rank DIMMs for about two years now, so 96GB using two slots and operating at high frequency has been an option. But even 64GB is still somewhat overkill for a gaming PC, putting you more into workstation territory.
2x48GB is also like $250. Cheaper than weekly error margins for high end GPUs. It just don't make sense not to max out. Felt smoothness in OS, likely from disk cache, is also noticeable when "extra" capacity is removed.
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...
