alt Hacker NewsWhat are your use-cases for 128gb of RAM? I find it hard to imagine what you could be doing with that, so it must be interesting :)
Replies
Unreal + blender + ide.
Fusion + blender + slicers.
Virt machines / docker + dev env
iOS Android web development
16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro
Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex
My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use
My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.
My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping
I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.
Unclear for a laptop, but for a workstation 1tb+ is what you want for any sort data science stuff.
most people who are into graphics processing e.g video-games, 3d for films/entertainment industry etc need these "PRO-workstation" machines, or doing fluid mechanics
if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient
Running FatLTO on Chrome.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do have a 64GB machine that I'd been planning to bump up to 128 right around the time the prices went through the roof. My uses are:
- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.
- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.
- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.