Large image manipulation has been done for years now, no? If we managed it ten years ago on comparably puny machines, what has changed? Images bigger I guess is one thing, but does that account for advances in RAM?
(Saying that I am amazed at how my desktop slows down with 4gb of RAM these days.)
Back in 1995, Toy Story was rendered with a server farm of 87 dual-processor 100MHz SPARCStations w/ 192MB of RAM and 30 quad-processor 100MHz SPARCStations w/ 384MB RAM.
I used to do professional digital video editing on Media 100s and Avids with 80-96 MB of RAM back in the mid-90s.
It's amazing how quickly top-of-the-line becomes crap.
2) Large image manipulation ( what I do)
32GB is what my laptop has, for this reason I cannot take this as a serious machibe.