[Discuss] smallest board that can handle 32 GB RAM

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 05/07/2014 10:50 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> 32 GB is probably still overkill for a desktop, but after suffering with
> a machine that's been on the low side, I'm pondering going to the other
> extreme for my next build.

I hate it when people respond to a question with "Why do you want to do 
that?", but forgive me, I am going to do it now: Why?

Here is why I ask: I am just shifting things over to a new 16GB machine. 
I got that much because I could and it was pretty cheap. But I don't 
know what I am going to do with all that. That is a *bleep* of a lot of RAM.

Being an old coot, I was marveling over how big my new disks are. 
Sometimes I watch the video podcast of NBC's Nightly News. And how many 
of that ~100MB file could I store?

Then it hit me: I could buffer up 100 episodes in RAM!  And still have 
enough to run a couple C++ programs, and an OS or three. Even emacs.

I don't run Microsoft software, so my general strategy for using all 
that RAM is to run virtual machines. But for non-graphical stuff and no 
Firefox tabs, just a couple hundred megabytes is still a lot of RAM.

Compiling all of Android Open Source Project supposedly requires that 
much RAM, but I don't believe it. They are just saying that so people 
won't try on too slow a machine. Right?

I can certainly imagine uses for RAM, such as big databases in RAM, 
simulating the physics of the real world (weather prediction, Pixar 
rendering their new film, cosmology simulations of the big bang, etc.), 
but it is hard to come up with much more without resorting to strategies 
based on waste.

How will I end of using my 16GB? How will you use 32GB?

-kb