When you need 32 or 64gb of ram is not because the data structures or the programs you use need memory, it's because the data they use (database content, virtual machines, images, videos, music... ) fill that ram, and those data is not going to occupy less on an arm machine.
However real case usage of such massive amount of data are limited for typical desktop user. Massive database load usually happen on specialized servers in which 256Go RAM and more are pretty mundane.
So on customer PC ram is maybe more used as caching mechanisms or eaten away by poorly designed memory leak/garbage collection.
And if your GPU is able do to real time rendering on data heavy load maybe you need less caching of intermediate results as well.
Plenty of use cases for more than 8gb of ram. When you're doing data analysis on even smaller datasets you may need several times more available memory than the size of the dataset as you're processing it.
1.Again typical use case for entry level PC is not data analysis on bigdata.
2.My current production server is a PostgreSQL database on a 16GB RAM VM running on Debian (my boss is stingy). This doesn't prevent me from managing a 300GB+ data cluster with pretty decent performances and perform actual data analysis.
3.If Chrome sometimes use +8GB for a godsake webrowser the only explanation is poor design, there is no excuse.
I think you’re right. I’ve only ever needed 32 gb when I was running a local hadoop cluster for development. Those virtual images required the same amount of ram regardless of OS.
