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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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I think they simply mean analogous in price.
What, no! 8 GB Apple RAM costs 4 times that of 16 GB regular DDR4 RAM module.
Edit: 5 times.
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."
I mean, i played with memory compression on linux too, but it's not a factor x2 and you trade that with more CPU utilization/less battery life. And even though software is not worse in efficiency on this side, webbrowsers, VMs and games still need the RAM.
I’ve seen this a lot on this thread, but this is Apple we’re talking about. They have billions of dollars to throw at making their memory compression far better than what’s on Linux. I still regularly use an 8gb ddr3 apple macbook air from 2017. It’s not as fast at computing as my 32gb windows laptop, but it feels more snappy. I also have a 16gb desktop, also windows, and the macbook feels just a little slower than that. A little. And it’s ddr3 vs ddr4
Ok, honestly, snappyness is mostly the duration of animations, hard to judge from that. Billions for better compression is a mixed bag; it must be cheaper than more RAM in manufacturer prices. And, atleast in Linux, you can choose the compression algorithm, while lz4 has almost memory speed.
Now i'm curious, are there memory load tests for Linux aswell as Mac?
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
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.
Really? They still doing UMA?
It's all unified: CPU, GPU, RAM and SSD as far as I remember.