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The way they did memory on the M1, they can only use two LPDDR4X chips. DRAM is on package, so they can only physically fit two on their package and presumably
by floatboth 5y ago
The way they did memory on the M1, they can only use two LPDDR4X chips. DRAM is on package, so they can only physically fit two on their package and presumably they do not have pins that would go off package for more memory channels at all.
Micron and Samsung make 12 Gb LPDDR4X chips, but Apple probably decided that having a 24 Gb option wouldn't be worth it, or would be an ugly number, or couldn't get enough supply, or all of that.
The M1 is for "consumer" tier devices anyway. Wait for M1X or Mwhatever – when they port the larger MBPs to their own silicon, that will have larger memory.
- vmception 5y agoGood answer! Apple doesn’t seem to shy away from “odd” numbers, like 4.5K resolution model I would go with supply combined with having enough supply of the 8gb modules but not enough of the 12gb ones that it would create strange tiers, while they would lean towards a 24gb machine
- bzzzt 5y agoThey make the odd resolution because they've committed to a certain amount of dpi ('super retina' resolution) and are marketing it as such. While it would be fun to be able to run a complete k8s cluster locally that's quite a niche usecase. There's not much software on the consumer side where having 32gb+ really makes a huge amount of difference. At least not the software Apple is showing in their presentations. Lots of people think they want a huge amount of memory, but macOS seems to be able to handle memory pressure (with transparant compression and swapping) quite well, even on machines with little memory.
- skunkworker 5y agoThey still are doing 16:10 displays. Which I wish I could find more of but everyone is doing 16:9 desktop at the moment. I don't know why it's so hard to find a 3840x2400 24" display.