3 ms·

I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules—

I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules— basically the Mac Fusion Drive of RAM, with an internal controller to manage moving stuff in and out of the low-latency area. I could certainly also see them going all-in on the integrated architecture, but the possibilities are intriguing if they want a reasonable story for a workstation that goes up to 100s of GB (the current Mac Pro's top configuration is an eye-watering 1.5TB of RAM).

chungus_khan 6y ago
There's not really any reason it would be slower. Being on-package doesn't offer any real performance advantage (the lengths of the traces to memory have a negligible impact on performance or latency), and is more of a benefit to manufacturing. The memory on the M1 actually has fairly poor latency compared to most x86 systems: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
rsynnott 6y ago
The on-package RAM is probably more aimed at reducing power consumption; it's not particularly low-latency. This obviously wouldn't be an issue for an MBP.