Dell announced on Tuesday the Precision T7500, which can support up 192 GB of memory, says the "Dreaming of a PC with 192GB of RAM?"
I am not the digital animator or engineer at whom these muscular machines are aimed. The machine I am using has a paltry 3GB and booting and shutting down is always a lengthy event -- five minutes booting up, three minutes to shut down unless I'm in a hurry and push the button. My machine just gets slower and slower and slower as I add Internet feeds, such as Twitter, and more applications.
Lenovo, too, has joined the fray with a 96GB machine that range in price from US$1,070 for the S20 to $1,500 for the D20, according to a . The does not say how much memory comes standard with models S20 or D50. Rest assured it's not 92GB of DDR3 RAM.
While DDR2 is cheap, DDR3 running at 1333Mhz (the fast stuff) is expensive at $3,400 for 16GB modules, according to the CW story.
What's made these giant memory capacities possible is Nehalem (apparently named after a city in Oregon bearing an Indian moniker) CPU, which enables large memories to work smoothly without traffic conflicts as with today's memory controllers.
For years, Intel used the argument that each successive generation of x86 CPU improved performance enough for many users to buy a new machine. That argument wore thin over time as users settled with a fix of applications and a machine whose power was sufficient for many years.
With Nehalem, perhaps Intel's given us a reason to consider a new machine, say a more modest one with a mere 16GB or 32GB of memory. I'll be watching for the reviews in coming weeks to see how huge memories perform.