A New Report States That Microsoft Is Requiring a Minimum of 16 GB of Memory for AI PCs

Peter_Brosdahl

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A new report states that Microsoft has provided baseline specifications for AI PCs and increased memory capacity is a priority. Increased memory requirements for PCs, regardless of platform, are always to be expected as new technology and features get introduced over time so it's no big surprise that the age of 8 GB of RAM is on its way out. After all, as the jokes go, exactly how many Chrome tabs were you hoping to keep open at one time anyway?

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Yea most of the mid tier laptops today come with 32 gig.
 
Hmm..

So I would say - ok, we have been at 8 for a long long time. But for most people (not all of us here, obviously) - the OS uses most of that for ... peripheral stuff ... and the rest of it is mostly used up by Chrome. Most things that get run by normal people on a daily basis - they just don't use a lot of RAM.

Office doesn't use a ton. Games require more these days, but it's rare to see one require more than 8G (they do exist, just not common outside of the big AAA releases). Just looking over the "Top Sellers" over at Steam right now - none of them require more than 8G (although a couple are recommending 16).

So. We are probably long past due for an upgrade there.

But.

But.

I'm all for upgrades, so long as they are useful. WTF is Microsoft going to use that RAM for on my PC? My understanding was that most of AI compute was done back in the cloud somewhere - my front end just did basic request processing and passed it on. It doesn't take 16G+ of RAM to do Voice Analysis or biometrics, or other basic AI tasks.

Sure, if you want to run a LLM offline, you need some RAM. But I wouldn't want my average office PC running LLMs - that adds a ton of cost to otherwise commodity PCs that get bought by the hundreds/thousands. Just like I don't need my basic office PC hosting a web server, or SQL database, or any number of other things that are best served being centralized and accessed by slimmer clients.
 
Endgame said:
Yes and no. I’m doing quite a bit of work on my 2GB raspberry pi 4s. Works great for Kodi on Xbian, pihole, etc.
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Yeah, but on Windows 64 bit it's far beyond being able to do that. I respect what RPs can do though as I've followed their development quite a bit over the last decade.
 
Honestly the push for more ram is ai driven. More and more people are going to want to experience AI. Fedora.. no that's not the name. But it just added voice ai response for any llm you're running through it. And those things need ram. As the singers lore feature rich even passing off the work to a remote server farm the ability for it to present and do more with that data requires more and more ram.

If you want to tinker with ai 32 gig is entry level. I'm about to add 64 gig to my system just to get more out of a local AI engine.
 
I've been running 32 GB with my desktops, and most of my laptops for more than a decade so it's probably just a short amount of time until I start moving to 64 GB. Granted, I only game and do relatively minor things but that strategy has worked well so far.

On the flip side, I've kept the workstations at 16 GB for a while now and that has panned out well also but have on some rare occasions seen office apps, and browser tabs, and updates, give a memory error but I can count those occurrences on one hand w/o repeating in 10+ years as well.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
On the flip side, I've kept the workstations at 16 GB for a while now and that has panned out well also but have on some rare occasions seen office apps, and browser tabs, and updates, give a memory error but I can count those occurrences on one hand w/o repeating in 10+ years as well.
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The out of memory error (at least with Chrome) doesn't appear to be related to system memory - I'll get that when I'm running at ~40gb of system memory used (out of 64gb). It's almost like there's a "lower memory" limit of around 640KB...
 
David_Schroth said:
The out of memory error (at least with Chrome) doesn't appear to be related to system memory - I'll get that when I'm running at ~40gb of system memory used (out of 64gb). It's almost like there's a "lower memory" limit of around 640KB...
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Good to know.
 
Excel starts to crap out on me when I'm working with datasets over a few Mb.

Not getting anywhere near impacting total system memory. Just old legacy code I suspect
 
Brian_B said:
Excel starts to crap out on me when I'm working with datasets over a few Mb.

Not getting anywhere near impacting total system memory. Just old legacy code I suspect
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Yeah, I've seen some strange things with various sorts. Basically falls on its face sometimes and I end up having to manually move something and for kicks I'll do the sort again and it keeps whatever change I made even though it couldn't figure it out beforehand.
 
Excel has been awful on my current system. Not a ram issue I can assure you.

Even with small 1 page sheets used for notes or very simple calculations it will freeze from time to time. I am wondering if having networked drives is a part of this - though even if the file is local it still happens.
 
Elf_Boy said:
Excel has been awful on my current system. Not a ram issue I can assure you.

Even with small 1 page sheets used for notes or very simple calculations it will freeze from time to time. I am wondering if having networked drives is a part of this - though even if the file is local it still happens.
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Try turning auto save off and see if that helps.
 
Grimlakin said:
Yea most of the mid tier laptops today come with 32 gig.
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I just checked and even mid-high end comes with only 16, actually less than 10% of the laptops on sale come with 32GB or more memory in the store I checked (~50 out of ~800) and about 40 of that 50 is in the 3000+ category.

And get this almost half of the lineup ~375 only has 8GB or less.
 
MadMummy76 said:
I just checked and even mid-high end comes with only 16, actually less than 10% of the laptops on sale come with 32GB or more memory in the store I checked (~50 out of ~800) and about 40 of that 50 is in the 3000+ category.

And get this almost half of the lineup ~375 only has 8GB or less.
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Sorry that surprises me. Should I have said modern mid tier. Is a 1400 dollar laptop mid tier is that considered high end? In my mind High end is around 3k.
 
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