Vince
As Spoonie articulated, using up 64GB Ram is very common with any kind of decent sized template. In our case, this is just one system out of three in the studio, which are interlinked with Vienna Ensemble Pro. The system in question is our Logic machine. Logic Pro X is running about 15GB of samples, and we have another 46GB in Vienna Ensemble Pro on this system. And that's with Kontakt 5's preload buffer set at 18Kb, which is pushing things - it should ideally be set much higher if you're streaming a lot of voices, but that would eat more RAM.
This rig really needs 96GB for now, and will most likely need 128GB within 12-18 months.
We also have a Windows 7 machine which hosts most of our orchestral libraries (again in Vienna Ensemble Pro - streaming to the main system via ethernet). It has 96GB installed, 80GB is in use. And then because network load becomes a limiting factor if everything is hosted on one system, we have a third rig (an identical Mac Pro but with 32GB RAM) which just hosts our Vienna Instruments libraries and runs ProTools HDX for mixing.
Do we really need all this for any one project ...? Of course not. Do we benefit from having a huge template at our disposal, and are there workflow and scheduling gains from working this way? Absolutely.
Back to the matter in hand. Apple seem to have discarded some fundamental specification principals for the sake of a cool design. No PCI based expansion? ... Not ideal, but as long as chassis provision is reliable, we'll live with that. No internal hard drives (effectively)? I have no experience of Thunderbolt, but again we'll work with what we're given and find solutions. Maximum RAM 64GB?! Sorry, that's just put the brakes on this investment. 4 DIMM slots is an outdated spec, and from what I'm reading above, it's not compensated for by any performance gains elsewhere.
The only possible explanation, is that 8 DIMM slots didn't fit into the beautifully honed cylinder or generated too much heat for the stunningly silent single-fan cooling system. Either way, design has trumped functionality, which at this end of the market is (IMHO) a mistake.
I wanted to love this machine, I had allocated funds for a big spec', I'm an absolute Apple devotee, and now I'm just left feeling slightly deflated.
Jules
Well, I think we may install 4 dimms (each dimm is 32GB or 64GB)?
After all, according to the Intel Datasheet, the Xeon support up to 64GB memory(single).