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,…
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,…
It’s an entirely different architecture, so every program needs less RAM (with exceptions like I mentioned above). That’s why they’re using shared RAM; because they can pull it off (mostly).
ARM is pretty efficient, that’s true. But an 8 gig video will always be an 8 gig video. No amount of processing and compression and swap tricks will make it occupy any less space without a massive hit to performance that an x86-64 arch with 16+GB of ram won’t have to endure.
Uhh what? That’s not how RAM works, you don’t load an entire 8GB video you’re playing into RAM.
You do if you’re editing it, and the editing capabilities are one of the main selling points of macOS
When you have 64GB of RAM, you do.
Lol
no
They’re using shared RAM because that’s what pretty much everybody has been doing for over a decade, including Apple themselves. They can have some smaller other bits also use the main memory now as they have control over everything with their own chips, but that’s pretty much it.
Doing that also doesn’t only have advantages - for example, on a phone the baseband also uses a segmented off bit of memory. If this is exploitable (or has a backdoor for law enforcement) you can bypass a phones security restrictions to read memory contents.
What Apple is doing quite well is how they handle swapping (that is, moving stuff that no longer fits into RAM to disk, and back) - on an 8GB Mac you’ll typically see some swap usage, even if the system is not much used. I recently got a 16GB MacBook Air for work - it uses up pretty much all the memory without much running. Some of that are caches, which can be freed without too much performance impact, but there are quite a few workloads I wouldn’t run on that thing to avoid constant swapping.