3 ms·
Yea, this is a BS theory. I have a 16Gb M1 MacBook Air and the real answer is that it has super fast SSD access, so you don’t notice the first few gigabytes of
by valuearb 6y ago
Yea, this is a BS theory. I have a 16Gb M1 MacBook Air and the real answer is that it has super fast SSD access, so you don’t notice the first few gigabytes of swap.
But when swap hits 8-9 Gb, it’s effects start to get very noticeable.
- Decade 6y agoThis seems correct. RC vs GC might explain how a Mac full of NSObjects needs less memory than a Windows full of .NET runtimes, but it doesn’t explain how M1 Mac with 16GB of RAM is faster than x86 Mac with 16GB or more of RAM. Besides, a lot of memory usage is in web browsers, which must use garbage collection. Looking at the reviews of M1 Macs, those systems are still responsive and making forward progress at a “memory pressure” that would make my x86 Mac struggle in a swap storm. It seems to come down to very fast access to RAM and storage, large on-die caches, and perhaps faster memory compression.
- tedd4u 6y agoI tend to agree! I think Big Sur on M1 uses 16kB page size vs 4kB on Intel so maybe that contributes to more efficient / less obvious perf issue when swapping.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tedd4u 6y agoOh one more thing, they said in the Apple Silicon event that they had eliminated a lot of the need for copying RAM around so … could be some actual footprint reduction there?