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I doubt the M1 macs are really using memory much more efficiently; the stock M1 macs with 8GB were available rapidly; the Macs with 16GB ram or larger disk spac
by notriskfree 6y ago
I doubt the M1 macs are really using memory much more efficiently; the stock M1 macs with 8GB were available rapidly; the Macs with 16GB ram or larger disk space had a three to four week delay when ordering; a lot of enthusiasts and influencers rushed out and got base models; they are then surprised to find they can work ok in most apps with only 8GB.
Perhaps they never really needed to fit 32GB into their intel macs either.
Some days after the glowing reviews; and strange comments about magic memory utilization; we now see comments concerned about SSD wear due to swap file usage.
If the applications and data structures are more compact in memory on the arm processors; it should be easy to test; you just need an intel mac; and an M1 mac running the same app on the same document and look at how much memory it uses.
- joking 6y agoWhen you need 32 or 64gb of ram is not because the data structures or the programs you use need memory, it's because the data they use (database content, virtual machines, images, videos, music... ) fill that ram, and those data is not going to occupy less on an arm machine.
- Twisell 6y agoHowever real case usage of such massive amount of data are limited for typical desktop user. Massive database load usually happen on specialized servers in which 256Go RAM and more are pretty mundane. So on customer PC ram is maybe more used as caching mechanisms or eaten away by poorly designed memory leak/garbage collection. And if your GPU is able do to real time rendering on data heavy load maybe you need less caching of intermediate results as well.
- Maxion 6y agoPlenty of use cases for more than 8gb of ram. When you're doing data analysis on even smaller datasets you may need several times more available memory than the size of the dataset as you're processing it.
- Twisell 6y ago1.Again typical use case for entry level PC is not data analysis on bigdata. 2.My current production server is a PostgreSQL database on a 16GB RAM VM running on Debian (my boss is stingy). This doesn't prevent me from managing a 300GB+ data cluster with pretty decent performances and perform actual data analysis. 3.If Chrome sometimes use +8GB for a godsake webrowser the only explanation is poor design, there is no excuse.
- llampx 6y ago"Nobody needs more than 640k of RAM"
- joking 6y agothat was not my point, my point was that if you need it, you will need it regardless of the architecture.
- Joeri 6y agoI think you’re right. I’ve only ever needed 32 gb when I was running a local hadoop cluster for development. Those virtual images required the same amount of ram regardless of OS.