What's with the focus on insane amounts of RAM for these new apple silicon chips? Is there some performance benefit specific to macs that would require 32GB+ of ram? Who on earth would need that in a desktop/laptop?
1. Using QGIS. It's the first real GIS project I've done. I'm using to do this sort of work in code, so it's been a fun learning experience too.
My project is limited to NY,OR,WA, but this clearly has a potential sparse raster problem. If I was doing it in code, I'd reach for internally tiled cloud-optimized geotiffs with low compression and I'd be pretty sure that all the empty tiles would get compressed down to nothing.
With QGIS, I can cross my fingers and hope it's doing something relatively sane with GDAL in the background.
I believe Apple uses very specific LPDDR5 packages then the pro and max have 2x and 4x buses so you need that many packages. This is why the M1 comes in 8GB ad 16GB, M1 Pro 16GB and 32GB and the Max is 32GB and 64GB.
The current M2 is 8, 16 and 24GB, so naturally a top spec M2 Max would have 4x 24GB so you get 96GB assuming they stick with a 512 bit bus.
I don’t think you need 64gb, my experience (on a 32gb machine) makes me think you need maybe 5gb per core to be safe from swapping, but presumably doubling is easier/faster than increasing in non 2^^x amounts.
Beyond that though, 64gb+ of RAM makes for a great dev machine. :)
Could we optimize the local stack more to use less resources? Probably, but it probably isn't worth our time. Until then, more RAM is good. There are plenty of users out there that have more needs than me. Giving them a solution to their problems is a step in the right direction.
But I have to say, 12 CPU cores and 96GB of memory is a fascinatingly odd pairing. Is the base spec going to have a 128GB hard drive?