Microsoft sets 16GB default for RAM for AI PCs – machines will also need 40 TOPS of AI compute: Report
Microsoft sets 16GB default for RAM for AI PCs – machines will also need 40 TOPS of AI compute: Report
You might thank AI for raising the entry-level PC RAM quota.
what the fuck is a "AI PC"?
112Branding. It's just saying it's capable of handling local models on copilot.
23If I have to deal with Blockchain cloud computing IoT bullshit as a software engineer, I want everyone else to feel my buzzword pain in the tech they use.
15The new 'VR Ready'
9I guess a PC with a graphics card?
9It's repurposed cryptocurrency architecture with a price hike. They have no video output, and you can string dozens of GPUs to a single motherboard to sell processing power online.
-6It's comical how much you think you know but how little you actually know.
14Nope.
They're just regular PC's with an NPU. These are consumer products they're trying to push.
11
Thus, Windows will again be instrumental in driving growth for the minimum memory capacity acceptable in new PCs.
I love that the primary driver towards more powerful hardware is Windows just bloating itself bigger and bigger. It's a grift in its own way, consumers are subsidizing the requirements for Microsoft's idiotic data processing. And MSFT is not alone in this, Google doing away with cookies also conveniently shifts away most ad processing from their servers into Chrome (while killing their competition).
80Google doing away with cookies also conveniently shifts away most ad processing from their servers into Chrome (while killing their competition).
OOTL, what's going on here? Distributed processing like Folding@Home, but for serving ads to make Google more money?
9They called it Federated Learning of Cohorts at one point. Instead of you sending raw activity data to Google servers and them running their models there, the model runs in Chrome and they only send back the ad targeting groups you belong to. All in the name of privacy of course.
16
Microsoft is desperate to regain the power they had in the 00s and is scrambling trying to find that killer app. At least this time they're not just copying apples homework.
44They either force it on everyone or bundle it in the enterprise package that businesses already pay for and then raise the price.
It never works, but maybe this time it will. I mean it won't... But maybe.
7And maybe that's why it isn't working. They try too hard to persuade or force you, giving people icky feelings from the get go... and they try too little to just make a product that people want.
8
At least it should result in less laptops being made with ridiculously small amounts of non upgradable RAM.
Requiring a large amount of compute power for AI is just stupid though. It will probably come in the form of some sort of dedicated AI accelerator that's not usable for general purpose computing.
43"Wanna see me fill entire landfills with e-waste due to bullshit minimum requirements?"
"Wanna see me do it again?"
30All I can think of:
Hi kids, do you like violence? Wanna see me stick nine-inch nails through each one of my eyelids? Wanna copy me and do exactly like I did? Try 'cid and get fucked up worse than my life is?
7Hyuk I'll fucking do it again!
2
no ai ain't gonna come into my pc
21Unless it's locally hosted, doesn't scan every single file on my storage and doesn't send everything I do with it to the manufacturer's server.
15Personally I really want it to but only locally run AI like lamma or whatever it's called
6Do it, it's easy and fun and you'll learn about the actual capabilities of the tech. Started a week ago and I'm a convert on the utility of local AI. Got to go back to Reddit for it but r/localllama has tons of good info. You can actually run useful models at a conversational pace.
This whole thread is silly because VRAM is what you need, I'm running some pretty good coding and general knowledge models in a 12GB Radeon. Almost none of my 32GB system ram is used lol either Microsoft is out of touch or hiding an amazing new algorithm
Running in system ram works but the processing is painfully slow on the regular CPU, over 10x slower
4
Everyone here is like praising microsoft when in fact you can just buy any pc's with 16 gig ram you like without the additional ai spyware and (cost if i may assume)
19my work laptop came with only 8 and can't be upgraded. The next model up was twice the price
6I'm not seeing anyone here praising Microsoft; actually the opposite. Who's praising Microsoft?
1
They are making for a long time now, a massive slow effort to make end users finally migrate to Linux (and I’m a whole life windows guy)
18Low amount of ram becomes the AI detox mechanism of this century.
17Great, so it'll take AI to set 16GB as minimum.
I still shudder that there are machines still being sold with 8GB RAM, that's just barely enough.
14It's honestly crazy to think about that we used to say the same about 4GB only 5-7 years ago...
And the same about 2GB a measly 10 years ago...
5 years ago I used to think 32GB was great. Now I regularly cap out and start page filing doing my normal day-to-day work on 48GB. It's crazy now.
3
AI PC sounds like something that will be artificially personal more than anything else.
13I get visions of HAL or that Simpsons Halloween special with the sentient house.
1Yes, AI PC like in the movie HER
-1
Makes sense, 16GB is sort of the new "normal" although 8GB is still quite enough for everyday casual use. "AI PCs" being a marketing term just like "AI" itself.
10Opening excel and outlook on a win11 PC brings you to almost 16GB of memory used. I don't know how anybody is still selling computers with 8GB of ram.
9That doesn't work even as a hyperbole. I literally just opened an Excel spreadsheet with 51192 rows (I had Outlook already open) and those two programs still only take 417 MB of RAM combined. Meanwhile Firefox is at 2.5 GB. Yes, my total RAM currently used is 13.8 GB but I have 64 GB of RAM installed and you should know that generally the more RAM you have, the more of it gets utilized by the system (this is true for all modern OS, not just Windows) which is a good thing, because it means better performance, since you can cache more things in RAM that would otherwise needed to be read from disk. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. So even if one computer uses 16 GB of RAM for some relatively simple tasks, it doesn't necessarily mean it wouldn't run or grind to a halt on a system with less RAM.
9Nephew them open for a week or so while using them consistently.
The memory usage will change drastically.
0
Uh... No, it doesn't. 8GB is definitely tight these days, but for simple word processing, email, and spreadsheet usage it still works fine.
6Why in the hell do those programs take up so much space?
5Usually, caching. They can and do use less RAM if you have less free, at the cost of slower performance.
3I mean on top of the rest of windows garbage.
0
Ah good. Now I know what specs not to buy.
5You have fun sticking to ms running your 8gb of ram, that'll show em!
7
Is that teraflops?
4