I recently started working on a little eCommerce project. I found a way to indirectly estimate the sales of some of my competitors products. So I downloaded about 13gb of this data, processed it down into about 80 million rows and than ran a bunch of stats on it. Now 80 million rows is not "big data" scale, but it's not super small either. With my 16gb of memory (that I paid I think $400 for), my humble quad core i7 that i paid $300 for, and my 500 GB SSD. that I paid $100 for, My less than $1k desktop crunched through this dataset with no effort at all. I consider myself a "power" user, and my humble machine can do everything I can throw at it, and more. It'll be a long time before I upgrade again, and when I do, i'll probably buy the cheapest processor on the market. I'm probably not alone here.