7 ms·
I thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits here. My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Ma
by bla3 5y ago
I thought the memory was one of the more interesting bits here.
My 2-year-old Intel MBP has 64 GB, and 8 GB of additional memory on the GPU. True, on the M1 Max you don't have to copy back and forth between CPU and GPU thanks to integrated memory, but the new MBP still has less total memory than my 2-year-old Intel MBP.
And it seems they just barely managed to get to 64 GiB. The whole processor chip is surrounded by memory chips. That's in part why I'm curious to see how they'll scale this. One idea would be to just have several M1 Max SoCs on a board, but that's going to be interesting to program. And getting to 1 TB of memory seems infeasible too.
- fotta 5y agoI'm interested to see how the GPU on these performs, I pretty much disable the dGPU on my i9 MBP because it bogs my machine down. So for me it's essentially the same amount of memory.
- gamacodre 5y agoWhy 1TB? 640GB ought to be enough for anything...
- gamacodre 5y agoHuh, I guess that was as bad an idea as the 640K one.
- saijanai 5y agoHow much per 8K x 10 bit color, video frame? Roughly 190GB per minute without sound. Trying to do special effects on more than a few seconds of 8K video would overwhelm a 64GB system, I suspect.
- jrk 5y agoVideo and VFX generally don't need to keep whole sequences in RAM persistently these days because: 1. The high-end SSDs in all Macs can keep up with that data rate (3GB/sec) 2. Real-time video work is virtually always performed on compressed (even losslessly compressed) streams, so the data rate to stream is less than that.
- gamacodre 5y agoYou were (unintentionally) trolled. My first post up there was alluding to the legend that Bill Gates once said, speaking of the original IBM PC, "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." (N.B. He didn't[0]) [0] https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/ https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-e...
- londons_explore 5y agoMemory is very stackable if needed, since the power per unit area is very low.
- Gene_Parmesan 5y agoJust some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur in the music production scene, and I know that sampling heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk. But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that. I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but I'm also aware there are workloads that I'm completely ignorant of.
- AdrianB1 5y agoNot many, but there are a few that need even more. My team is running SQL servers on their laptops (development and support) and when that is not enough, we go to Threadrippers with 128-256GB of RAM. Other people run Virtual Machines on their computers (I work most of the time in a VM) and you can run several VMs at the same time, eating up RAM really fast.
- dylan604 5y agoOn a desktop Hackintosh, I started with 32GB that would die with out of memory errors when I was processing 16bit RAW images at full resolution. Because it was Hackintosh, I was able to upgrade to 64GB so the processing could complete. That was the only thing running.
- jsjohnst 5y agoWhat image dimensions? What app? I find this extremely suspect, but it’s plausible if you’ve way undersold what you’re doing. 24Mpixel 16bit RAW image would have no problem generally on an 4gb machine if it’s truly the only app running and the app isn’t shit. ;)
- dylan604 5y agoI shoot timelapse using Canon 5D RAW images, I don't know the exact dimensions off the top of my head but greater than 5000px wide. I then grade them using various programs, ultimately using After Effects to render out full frame ProRes 4444. After Effects was running out of memory. It would crash and fail to render my file. It would display an error message that told me specifically it was out of memory. I increased the memory available to the system. The error goes away. But I love the fact that you have this cute little theory to doubt my actual experience to infer that I would make this up.
- mlindner 5y agoHow much of that 64 GB is in use at the same time though? Caching not recently used stuff from DRAM out to an SSD isn't actually that slow, especially with the high speed SSD that Apple uses.
- RantyDave 5y agoRight. And to me, this is the interesting part. There's always been that size/speed tradeoff ... by putting huge amounts of memory bandwidth on "less" main RAM, it becomes almost half-ram-half-cache; and by making the SSD fast it becomes more like massive big half-hd-half-cache. It does wear them out, however.
- derefr 5y ago> but the new MBP still has less total memory From the perspective of your GPU, that 64GB of main memory attached to your CPU is almost as slow to fetch from as if it were memory on a separate NUMA node, or even pages swapped to an NVMe disk. It may as well not be considered "memory" at all. It's effectively a secondary storage tier. Which means that you can't really do "GPU things" (e.g. working with hugely detailed models where it's the model itself, not the textures, that take up the space) as if you had 64GB of memory. You can maybe break apart the problem, but maybe not; it all depends on the workload. (For example, you can't really run a Tensorflow model on a GPU with less memory than the model size. Making it work would be like trying to distribute a graph-database routing query across nodes — constant back-and-forth that multiplies the runtime exponentially. Even though each step is parallelizable, on the whole it's the opposite of an embarrassingly-parallel problem.)
- andrekandre 5y agoso whats the implication of this? that apples specific use cases for the m1 series is basically "prosumer" ? (sorry if i'm just repeating something obvious)
- Vomzor 5y agoThat's not how M1's unified memory works. >The SoC has access to 16GB of unified memory. This uses 4266 MT/s LPDDR4X SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) and is mounted with the SoC using a system-in-package (SiP) design. A SoC is built from a single semiconductor die whereas a SiP connects two or more semiconductor dies. SDRAM operations are synchronised to the SoC processing clock speed. Apple describes the SDRAM as a single pool of high-bandwidth, low-latency memory, allowing apps to share data between the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine efficiently. In other words, this memory is shared between the three different compute engines and their cores. The three don't have their own individual memory resources, which would need data moved into them. This would happen when, for example, an app executing in the CPU needs graphics processing – meaning the GPU swings into action, using data in its memory. https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwidth_memory_performance/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/19/apple_m1_high_bandwid... These Macs are gonna be machine learning beasts.
- sulam 5y agoSo, M1 has been out for a while now, with HN doom and gloom about not being able to put enough memory into them. Real world usage has demonstrated far less memory usage than people expected (I don't know why, maybe someone paid attention and can say). The result is that 32G is a LOT of memory for an M1-based laptop, and 64G is only needed for very specific workloads I would expect.
- astrange 5y agoMeasuring memory usage is a complicated topic and just adding numbers up overestimates it pretty badly. The different priorities of memory are something like 1. wired (must be in RAM) 2. dirty (can be swapped) 3. purgeable (can be deleted and recomputed) 4. file backed dirty (can be written to disk) 4. file backed clean (can be read back in). Also note M1's unified memory model is actually worse for memory use not better. Details left as an exercise for the reader.
- simonh 5y agoUnified memory is a performance/utilisation tradeoff. I think the thing is it's more of an issue with lower memory specs. The fact you don't have 4GB (or even 2 GB) dedicated memory on a graphics card in a machine with 8GB of main memory is a much bigger deal than not having 8GB on the graphics card on a machine with 64 GB of main RAM.
- kmonsen 5y agoOr like games, even semi-casual ones. Civ6 would not load at all on my mac mini. Also had to fairly frequently close browser windows as I ran out of memory.
- concinds 5y agoI couldn't load Civ6 until I verified game files in Steam, and now it works pretty perfectly. I'm on 8GB and always have Chrome, Apple Music and OmniFocus running alongside.
- 5y ago