Gone are the days when CPUs were only able to address 16GB of RAM. Intel’s new 9th generation CPUs (the ones coming out on October 19) are capable of addressing 128GB of DDR4 RAM. These are the i9-9900k, i7-9700k, and i5-9600k.
128GB of RAM is a bit much for normal usage, and is overkill even for gaming. However, there are a few reasons for a processor to support 128GB of RAM:
- Upgrades: 5-10 years from now, upgrading to 128GB of RAM won’t be nearly as excessive as it would be now, as the system requirements of apps is likely to increase substantially.
- Video rendering and production: You can always count of video rendering to eat up every last GB of RAM (and every last core your CPU has) that your PC has, regardless of how much it is. More RAM generally translates to faster video rendering, unless you have another bottleneck holding your PC back. This is why the iMac Pro, which has specs that are considered excessive by many are actually very helpful for video production uses.
- Running tests on AI software at home (in some cases).
Why I didn’t mention home web servers: PCs are not built for that kind of usage (it isn’t that they’re deficient in processing power). Servers are built with hard drives, processors, and ECC RAM which are better for web servers.
