[Discuss] smallest board that can handle 32 GB RAM

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

I think we are entering an interesting era here.

My current notebook has two RAM slots and came with a 4GB module in one. 
For not much money I could put in 16GB. I have never gotten around to 
it. Whenever I look at my RAM usage either a perverse number of Firefox 
tabs are open or some other perverse thing is going on. Otherwise, it is 
being used as disk cache.

Granted, I do Linux kernel compiles on a bigger machine at work, but it 
"only" has 8GB. I assume the disk cache helps a lot, and a full kernel 
compile is pretty fast once the cache is hot, but other than cache I 
still never "use" much of the RAM except for some version of waste.

I guess I have a lot of digital photos. That is a lot of data, RAM seems 
useful for that, but even then, I need to keep them on disk, so I need 
to read them off disk: sounds like a cache example. Were I doing video 
editing, especially were I doing special effects across lots of frames, 
RAM would be directly useful.

Mostly if we want to use lots of RAM and disk, we have to start sampling 
the analog world to get enough data. Which is cool.

Yes, more RAM is good, I like RAM, but we are getting to such big 
numbers here. Things change.

-kb