8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro ‘Analogous to 16GB’ on PCs, Claims Apple::Following the unveiling of new MacBook Pro models last week, Apple surprised some with the introduction of a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip,…
I think they simply mean analogous in price.
The interviewee seems to be meaning it as memory usage (quote from them): "Comparing our memory to other system’s memory actually isn’t equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture.
Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently."
If anything the memory being unified between the GPU and CPU makes it even less than 8GB equivalent
Wait, unified VRAM? This is even worse. I thought that they meant all CPU cores share same bus.
They were making a joke about it being expensive
because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory,
Do they use below 24 megs of RAM in console? Or below 500 megs in GUI? Well, 500 megs is upper bound, I should probably compare to something less bloated than KDE.
and we have a unified memory architecture.
Really? They still doing UMA?
It’s all unified: CPU, GPU, RAM and SSD as far as I remember.
My dick is 2 inches long. That’s analogous to 10 inches on Mars.
Enough with this Martian slander
RAM is RAM. If you’re able to manage it better, that’s nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it’s 2x as “efficient?”
Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.
Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.
I’m specifically talking about the in memory compression, not swap.
But memory compression works the same way swap works. When memory is needed LRU page is
written on diskcompressed, and where application needs to read data from compressed page it generates pagefault and OS loads(decompresses) page in memory. That’s it.It can be compressed in RAM, too.
Thanks, cap, this is what I said.
Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something
They actually just it in Windows 10. There were third party add ons to do so prior to then, but they had marginal impact from my experience.
Did you know that you could do RAM compression on “old” MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.
RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max’s ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
Most of the things that “use” ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.
RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.
Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.
Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster.
What a bullshit I see.
Of all the points in their blatantly wrong comment, this probably wasn’t the one to single out. The reason for the soldered RAM is due to speed and length of traces. The longer the trace, the more chance there is for signal loss. By soldering the Ram close to the cpu the traces are shorter, allowing for a minuscule improvement in latency.
To be clear, I don’t like it either. It’s one of the major things holding me back from buying a MacBook right now.
The longer the trace, the more chance there is for signal loss.
While this is true on paper, we don’t need to pretend that this is an unsolved problem in reality. It’s not like large-scale motherboard manufacturers simply refuse to put their RAM closer to the CPU, and it’s littered with data loss. Apple also didn’t do anything innovative by soldering the RAM onto their motherboards. This is simply bootlicking Apple for what’s actually planned obsolescence.
I can’t speak for this particular instance but the reason swappable RAM sticks aren’t “littered with data loss” is because they are designed not to. I.e. Only rated up to a certain speed and timings. Putting RAM physically closer to the CPU does allow you to utilize the RAM better. It’s physics.
Personally, I’d rather take a performance hit than be stuck with a set amount of RAM unless there was some ungodly performance gain.
Putting RAM physically closer to the CPU does allow you to utilize the RAM better. It’s physics.
If the RAM was 3x closer, would it somehow be faster? I’m looking for metrics. With the same stick of any given DDR5, how much performance loss is there on a few example motherboards of your choice?
My point, again, is that yes, on paper, shorter wires means less opportunity for inductance issues, noise, voltage drop, cross-talk, etc. But this is all on paper.
It’s not like every motherboard manufacturer doesn’t know what they’re doing and Apple’s brilliant engineers somehow got a higher clock speed than what the RAM is rated for because… shorter wires?
Case in point: DDR4 is meant to operate at a maximum clock speed per the specs of DDR4. However, on plenty of motherboards that are overclock-capable will support memory that is more than 3x the clock of what DDR4 should be capable of. How does this work with memory that is not soldered into the motherboard?
Additionally, without overclocking, the memory is designed to operate at a clock speed. Will shorter traces to the RAM magically increase the capable clock speed of the RAM? Are these the “physics” you’re referring to?
I know I’ve seen something about this topic. I want to say it was from LTT but I can’t find the video.
I didn’t say anything about it being faster. I said utilize it better. Lower latency can be a big help as it allows quicker access. Think of HDD vs SSD. The biggest advantage in the beginning was the much lower latency SSDs provided. Made things a lot snappier even if the speed/throughput wasn’t all that different.
I don’t know what kind of difference we’re taking about here, or how much real world preformance benefits there are but there’s a reason CPUs have caches on the die.
And that doesn’t include whatever other benefits shorter traces provide. Less voltage drop might be helpful.
But, flexibility must still be better than those gains else most manufacturers would have switched. At some point you start running out of better ways to improve performance though. That’s why things are going back to being integrated with the CPU again.
Same way itx boards are preferred for ram oc. But i doubt apple is pushing crazy timings and clocks.
Exactly. There is an actual, tangible benefit of doing it that way. I don’t like it, as it creates situations where you’re unable to upgrade your own hardware, but it does make sense for the 95% of the population who has never opened a laptop, let alone tried to replace ram
More apple gaslighting.
Lol no. My poor linux kernel barely keeps everything stable in 8GB and even then by shoving stuff into swapon zram.
I can just barely run a game and have a ton of FF tabs open + an IDE + discord + multiple desktops
WIndows basically dies once you hit the swap, and it usually starts at like 2GB used.
I’m assuming MacOS lies between Linux and Windows in memory management and performance, so it’ll definitely start lagging if you open too much.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG. In that case you advertise the MPG. And in Apple’s case, it would be something like “X% less RAM usage per system process” which we all know doesn’t actually exist because its snake ass Apple.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can’t call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG.
lol good luck when Tesla literally charges $12k for “full self driving” software that does not do what’s advertised nor do what was promised over the last 10 years the CEO has been selling it. FTC and other orgs are toothless when it comes to false advertising, they’ll do nothing.
What helps these machines are built-in SSDs that operate at about 2 GB/s. If swapping out 2 GB of background tabs you’re not looking at when you switch to your IDE takes a second, you’re not really going to notice it. Only if you’re actually trying to operate with all the memory at the same time (big Kubernetes test suites or something) is when the swapping becomes noticeable.
So are they going to make the software smaller? What about iOS? Physically how does 8GB = 16GB? Can’t wait to see Photoshop open a RAW and run out of memory. I will say the M2 CPU was pretty slick and if I got one cheap I’d throw Linux on there.
This ^
Architecture changes can happen as much as they want, but there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory, and between that and poor developer optimization I doubt these improvements will be seen by the end user.
The CPUs really are great. It’s hard to want any other laptop when the performance/battery life are so great on the M series
there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory
Sure… and for editing a 12 megapixel photo that number is 384MB (raw or jpeg is irrelevant by the way - it’s the megapixels that matter).
As you add layers, you need more memory… but to run into issues at 8GB you’d need a lot of layers. And nobody is saying 8GB is enough for everyone, Apple does sell laptops with 128GB of RAM. They wouldn’t do that if nobody needed it.
And photoshop, which has it’s origins in the late 1980’s, is actually pretty lean. Back in those days it was common to only have one megabyte of RAM and Adobe has kept a lot of the memory management gymnastics they needed to fit within that limit. If you run out of memory it will make smart decisions about what to keep in RAM vs move to swap.
photoshop […] lean
???
Yeah, not sure if they’ve used PS in the last few years, but lean is not a word I’d use to describe it
You’re entirely leaving out the ~2-4GB of system overhead, 1-2gb just to have PS open and then having headroom left on top.
Oh and by the way, Lightroom eats ~45gb of RAM when importing. Also file sizes are much bigger for any decent camera now. I shoot 45MP and files are huge now
My 0.7l wine bottle can fit in 3l of water
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Tell that to my Ableton Live copy and all the plugins.
Ok this is completely valid. Those plugins suck the jooce.
Softwares and large files need ram too
But apple says Mac will get AAA games
I call BS. My 8gb Mac Mini is terrible and constantly running out of memory.
I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify. A minimum of 32gb, preferred 64gb (photographer working with very large files) costs hundreds extra and can’t be done by myself anymore. It’s also hard to find these ones used as the people who buy them have a specific use case and don’t replace them often.
I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify.
Framework. Framework or desktop computer.
Framework doesn’t fit the usecase, and I’m not running Linux or windows on a laptop
I need a laptop with specifically huge battery life, a mainstream OS and Adobe compatibility.
Edit: You really shouldn’t be downvoted for suggesting Framework. For anyone who wants a decently powerful windows or Linux laptop, it’s a great product, it just unfortunately doesn’t fit the use case that I have in mind for a laptop.
Is it an M3?
M1, but same idea. One app can take 8gb of RAM easy on it. No matter the improvements to the architecture, they’re not going to be able to solve for poor implementation on the dev side
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“lol” said Apple “lmao”
I bought a 8gig and I’m usually running apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I really feel the hit.
Work bought me 16gig M1 and it is noticeably faster when swapping around between apps.
Fuck 8gigs
Ha! Of course we will see this as a reduction in price, right?.. Tim Apple?.. Are you there?..
Fucking apple with the dumb ass marketing again. Can’t wait to explain to fanbois you can’t shove 16 lbs of shit into an 8 lbs bag…
I had to use an m1 base air for school. The CPU was fast but ram was always at Ower 90 percent while doing almost nothing
ram is meant to be used so high ram usage is not really any indicator of efficiency. if ram is slow and application is being swapped in and out frequently then it will be laggy but high ram usage can also be an indicator of a snappier experience.
Fucking lol
