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Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM (9to5mac.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The video has a short section on productivity (i.e. rendering or compiling). That part is probably the most relevant for most people. Check the chapter view in YouTube to jump directly to it.

I think a 2x performance improvement is plausible when comparing non-soldered ram to the Apple silicon, which goes even further and has the memory on the die itself. If, of course, ram is the limiting factor.

The advantages of upgradable, expandable ram are obvious. But let's face it: most people don't need and even less use that capability.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

short section on productivity

Looks about the same as the rest. Big gains for handbrake, pretty much nothing for anything else. And that makes sense, because handbrake will be doing lots of roundtrips to the GPU for encoding.

has the memory on the die itself

On the package, not the die. But perhaps that's what you meant. On die would be closer to a massive cache like on the X3D AMD chips.

The performance improvement seems to be that Apple has a massive iGPU, not anything to do with RAM next to the CPU. So in CPU-only benchmarks, I'd expect the lion's share of the difference to be CPU design and process node, not the memory.

Also, unified memory isn't particularly new, APUs have supported it for years. It's just not well utilized by devs because most users have dGPUs. So I think the main innovation here is Apple committing to it and providing tooling for devs to utilize the unified memory better, like console manufacturers have done.

So I guess that brings a few more questions:

what performance improvements could we see if devs use unified memory in socketed LPDDR memory in laptops?
how would that compare to Apple's on-package RAM (I think it's also LPDDR, so more apples to apples?)?
how likely are AMD and Intel to push for massive APUs on laptops?

I guess we're kind of seeing it with the gaming PC handhelds, like Steam Deck and Ayaneo etc al, so maybe that'll become more mainstream.