Off-topic: one of my favorite dev environments had a half terrabyte of memory, and it was _fantastic_ for prototyping -- we rarely had to be bothered with disk spillover or any of the other time sucks that arise in low-RAM environments.
Typically you'd be operating on a lot of data of some kind and gain a lot in productivity by being able to keep all of it (ideal case) or large chunks of it (sampling, LRU cache, etc) in memory all at once.
Having more RAM also enables some workflow changes. You can aggressively point things like intermediate compilation steps or testing databases to a ramdrive. Any time you're doing anything moderately expensive you can cache the result in RAM to make it cheaper to use next time. When choosing algorithms you can bias heavily toward time in any time-space tradeoffs.
> Do you think most developers can benefit with this much RAM?
I'd wager they could use more than they have typically ;) But no, 512GB seems excessive to me for most developer use cases with today's software. In my current job I haven't had a single use case for that much, and there have only been a few instances where 128GB would have been much more productive than what I have.
