You'd be surprised how fast you can run out of memory if you are mastering your own, non-professional 5k/4k video and applying some advanced non-linear operations such as video stabilization. It's not GPU accelerated, parallelism is limited by the nature of the algorithm which makes rendering farms useless. Do you need a power hungry and noisy server with slower single thread performance than a top end i7 just for additional RAM?

On the other hand, beyond 32GB, ECC seems to be very important so you probably won't have any choice but to buy a proper workstation unless AMD makes a miraculous processor on par with i7 (as they do support ECC in all models).

> non-linear operations such as video stabilization

What do you mean by non-linear? Are you referring to an equation containing a linear combination of the dependent variable and its derivatives, or something else?

Usually a non-linear video operation would mean one that doesn't just process each frame of the video beginning-to-end, like moving clips around.

Stabilization seems pretty linear to me, though.

Virtual machines behaves best with as much ram as a normal machine. Assuming you have 3 machines running, osx host and windows+linux vms and you want to give them 12gb each you are already at 30+. Might sound like a crazy setup but some times a compiler is only supported on one platform and then you want a replica of your clients server in one VM etc etc.

No, not really. I work in a games studio and our usage on individual workstations goes above 32GB when compiling our project. Due to technical and licencing issues it's also not something that can be relegated to a remote server farm for compilation.

If it's that gigantic, then a distributed build on local servers makes a lot of sense. Much faster than each developer doing it on their own single workstation.

We do distributed builds on local workstations across the studio with Incredibuild. That's the only way we could get away with licencing for consoles. That reduces the build times(from over 40 minutes to less than 5) but the RAM usage is still very very high.

Im guessing this is C++ with a lot of template abuse and header interdependencies? C++ has a powerful compiler, buts its also easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.

Yep. Also the fact that the project cross compiles on 7 different platforms from the same code base.

If you didn't need the 5k display but you did need more memory and rendering capacity, the Mac Pro has you covered maxing out at 64 GB of RAM or 128 GB is you use non-Apple RAM upgrades. So there's that.