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."
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
If anything the memory being unified between the GPU and CPU makes it even less than 8GB equivalent
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?
My dick is 2 inches long. That’s analogous to 10 inches on Mars.
Holy crap, apple charges $200 to add 8GB of RAM. I just bought 32GB of DDR5 for the Framework I have on order for $95.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
That might be true but it’s also embarrassing for all pc brands who get slaughtered by apples performance as soon as they actually attempt to make things. For example there isn’t a single laptop in the windows world that can match anything apple does
Any laptop with a recent GPU will beat an Apple Laptop for performance. Some higher end CPUs too.
Apple has really good power efficiency, which is great when unpluged, but plugged in laptops with 200 to 300W TDPs are still better.
Hahahahaha
I have friends who spec for their clients every day (I only do it occasionally). Mac laptops cost anywhere from 50% to 100% more than equivalent Dell and Lenovo laptops (ignoring the even less-costly brands, because none of us spec those).
They all have access to the same hardware. And MacOS, despite the gaslighting in this article, isn’t any more performant on the same hardware in the real world.
Circumstances outside gaming where any high end laptop isn’t good enough is pretty niche and I don’t think this really matters to most consumers. I would prefer to run Linux but at work, my options are Windows or MacOS. It’s a pretty easy choice. Apple products are great when someone else is paying for them.
This is mainly due to Windows being incompetent getting an ARM version of Windows in a usable state.
Snapdragon claims to have a M2 level ARM chip for desktop/laptop. It will likely be pretty comparable to the M2, but what OS will it run? Not Windows. In fact at the enterprise level, Lenovo is selling laptops with Android in desktop mode.
So, once that chip is released, I am guessing you will see great options with Linux and Android. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will surprise us with an update that lets Windows run reasonable well on ARM.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it’s a status symbol.
Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
DDR5 runs at 52GB/s. Apple uses RAM that runs at up to 800GB/s (if you have enough, gets faster the more you have since it runs in parallel… but it’s never as slow as DDR5).
Huge doubt here. Apple RAM is LPDDR5. That’s Low Power DDR5.
Citing this site:
LPDDR5 runs up to 6400 Mbps with many low-power and RAS features including a novel clocking architecture for easier timing closure. DDR5 DRAMs with a data-rate up to 6400 Mbps support higher density including a dual-channel DIMM topology for higher channel efficiency and performance.
I’m looking at the Apple M2 Wikipedia page and it has the 800GB/s number you have, but that’s gotta be something like RAM speed times number of RAM unit blocks for overall bandwidth.
Apple RAM is not magically 15 times faster than DDR5.
tl;dr
The memory bandwidth isn’t magic, nor special, but generally meaningless. MT/s matter more, but Apple’s non-magic is generally higher than the industry standard in compact form factors.
Long version:
How are such wrong numbers are so widely upvoted? The 6400Mbps is per pin.
Generally, DDR5 has a 64-bit data bus. The standard names also indicate the speeds per module: PC5-32000 transfers 32GB/s with 64-bits at 4000MT/s, and PC5-64000 transfers 64GB/s with 64-bits at 8000MT/s. With those speeds, it isn’t hard for a DDR5 desktop or server to reach similar bandwidth.
Apple doubles the data bus from 64-bits to 128-bits (which is still nothing compared to something like an RTX 4090, with a 384-bit data bus). With that, Apple can get 102.4GB/s with just one module instead of the standard 51.2GB/s. The cited 800GB/s is with 8: most comparable hardware does not allow 8 memory modules.
Ironically, the memory bandwidth is pretty much irrelevant compared to the MT/s. To quote Dell defending their CAMM modules:
In a 12th-gen Intel laptop using two SO-DIMMs, for example, you can reach DDR5/4800 transfer speeds. But push it to a four-DIMM design, such as in a laptop with 128GB of RAM, and you have to ratchet it back to DDR5/4000 transfer speeds.
That contradiction makes it hard to balance speed, capacity, and upgradability. Even the upcoming Core Ultra 9 185H seems rated for 5600 MT/s-- after 2 years, we’re almost getting PC laptops that have the memory speed of Macbooks. This wasn’t Apple being magical, but just taking advantage of OEMs dropping the ball on how important memory can be to performance. The memory bandwidth is just the cherry on top.
The standard supports these speeds and faster. To be clear, these speeds and capacity don’t do ANYTHING to support “8GB is analogous to…” statements. It won’t take magic to beat, but the PC industry doesn’t yet have much competition in the performance and form factors Apple is targeting. In the meantime, Apple is milking its customers: The M3s have the same MT/s and memory technology as two years ago. It’s almost as if they looked at the next 6-12 months and went: “They still haven’t caught up, so we don’t need too much faster, yet-- but we can make a lot of money until while we wait.”
Faster isn’t everything. Less, faster ram is only applicable to a few application, where more, slower ram is going to benefit everything.
It’s definitely comparable because that’s what it’s competing against. 16gb of Ram is 16gb of Ram, no matter how fast it is. Pricing it at 2-3x the cost for any other equivalent isn’t competitive at all.
You’re comparing single channel performance to entire system performance.
That statement simply means the most highest of the high end Mac has 16 memory channels (admittedly more than EPYCs 12, but EPYC is in the ballpark). The mere mortal entry M2 has two channels, just like almost every desktop/laptop grade x86 CPU. They are not getting 800 out of only 8Gb of modules.
I’m really interested in this kinda thing, do you have sources I can read?
What I found was DDR5 runs at a max of 64 GB/s, and the M2 Pro runs at 400 GB/s. I can’t find anything about it being faster due to running in parallel. Edit:I found it, looks like the M2 Ultra runs at 800 GB/s, cool. If I’m reading correctly, this was done by connecting two M2 Pros
Also, the PS5 allegedly has over 400GB/s bandwidth just for perspective
Note those are comparing different numbers.
The number you quoted was for a single memory channel.
A processor has as many memory channels as it feels like. So that 800 number basically means about 16 channels. The M2 plain seems to be about two channels.
For comparison, x86 desktop CPUs have long been 2 channel designs. You go up the stack and you have things like EPYC having 12 channels.
So for single socket design, apple likely has a higher max memory performance than you can do single socket in x86 (but would likely turn in lower numbers than a dual socket x86 box).
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.
Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something
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.
