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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2021-01-25, 04:17

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
16 years ago I could see a scenario where 32GB of RAM would be useful. But, 15 years from now I cannot see a scenario where 32TB will be.
New milestones enable new applications.

For example, I personally wouldn't have envisioned, when the first iPhone launched: "one day, its SoC will be so fast, the camera will be significantly enhanced through on-device processing: to figure out, at 60fps, which pixels are likely faces and therefore should probably be in focus; to figure out the right white balance; to do a form of HDR; etc.". It wasn't remotely feasible with the weird Samsung chip it had. With the A14, it's solidly there, and they added the "oh, we can write a DNG-based RAW format that also includes metadata of what our signal processing would've done" cherry on top, which they only can because the RAM is (barely) enough on the Pro models.

All this processing power hasn't made word processing a thousand times better, but it has made it a fair bit better: collaborative editing has become mass-market in the past few years, and works mostly OK now. Very hard to do in the 90s. It used to be that you had to very deliberately think about which settings to apply to the Photoshop filter, because you'd have to wait minutes. Now, it can just do it live.

What if one of the things for VR to actually work (sorry, Oculus, this ain't quite it yet) is another leap in performance?

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
There is going to come a point where RAM is no longer even a consideration. Storage speeds will be fast enough that storage and RAM will become synonymous.
There's still about an order of magnitude difference between RAM and SSD throughput, and I see no reason that discrepancy would eventually go away.

"Enough" is the big question there; will SSDs become fast enough that you don't need RAM at all. (Intel seems to have mostly given up on their not-quite-RAM-not-quite-SSD 3D XPoint / Optane experiment. That could mean that it was ahead of its time, though.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
16GB of RAM gives the average user enough RAM for the next 10 years minimum!
I think that's optimistic. I wouldn't be surprised if macOS Compton in 10 years doesn't even boot off less than 32 GiB RAM.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
When I first started doing this 16 years ago, 1GB of RAM was a dream come true. Now, 8GB of RAM is plenty*. That is a factor of 8 over 16 years. If that ratio holds true, then the next 16 years will carry us to 64GB of RAM as the "gold standard" for average users.
I started at 64 KiB. That never seemed like a lot, but in comparison, the several MiB on the Mac LC did. Now, I have 16 GiB, and it's definitely not enough for my use cases. (Granted, I'm high-end.)

The iPhone started at 128 MiB. It is now at 4-6 GiB. I bet there's already features that won't be able to ship until it goes to 8 GiB and beyond.

The iPad can only afford to have so much less RAM than a Mac because its UI is constrained in multitasking capabilities.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
Oh, and there wouldn't even be a need for all this storage if the average user didn't keep every single picture they ever took with their phone! But, holy cow I see libraries approaching 50,000 plus photos and they're mostly duplicate, blurry photos of the exact same thing but where the photographer wriggled over three inches for a "better shot", etc., etc., etc.
50k isn't that much, really!

But also, that's the wrong approach. The right approach is for the Photos app to figure this out (in a similar vein to how Aperture did, a decade ago), merge those photos into 'stacks', suggest a pick, and then eventually ask "hey, should I even bother with the bad ones?".

But even then, some people are hoarders. Don't make them feel bad about it!

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
The next big innovations are going to be in access speeds, AR, on-device ML, and battery life. Average-use RAM and storage sizes are going to begin to level off. Creative pro's will most certainly need more, but the average-use cases are plateauing.
I agree with the first sentence, but don't see why you're so confident about plateauing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer View Post
And I predict there will be an episode of Hoarders focused specifically on photo libraries. "I need all 836 pictures of Aunt Persnippity, because what happens if I lose one of them?"

Why not? It's nice to have as many moments as possible from a person. Those moments — and eventually, the people — pass.
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