6 ms·

> Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that spe

> Not to be rude but this is an inaccurate and poor understanding of computers Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?

hxegon 4y ago
Generally won't be swapping that often I would think, but besides the point because swap with SSDs (that are as good as the ones in MBs) isn't a big performance hit like it used to be. Swap also doesn't degrade SSD lifetimes like it used to.
cassianoleal 4y ago
> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. > What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
- petercooper 4y ago
  In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    Ah beat me to it! The idea that Mx swapping to NVME is essentially no-op from performance perspective is patently wrong.
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      I don't know what people are reading into my comment. I said _if_ SSD speeds were comparable to RAM, RAM wouldn't be needed. The reason we need it is precisely because disk is slower and cheaper.
      - girvo 4y ago
        I think people just want to argue, so they half read your comment.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Apple must've spent a fortune on marketing bamboozlement ("you don't need as much RAM with apple silicone") that even people on HN now seem to parrot it. NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall. As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    > Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. Plenty of people will be more than happy with 8GB of RAM on an M1. I had a base model M1 Mac Mini and it worked great even for gaming. Obviously if you're running VMs or editing video or doing any other memory intense workload you're going to need more memory. But for anyone who doesn't need an absurd (>16gb) amount of memory (college students, many programmers, those who use computers just for web browsing and Netflix), 8GB or 16GB will feel snappy.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    > even people on HN now seem to parrot it. There's no need for personal attacks. > as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall. Yes, probably. Two points though: 1. My comment was that _if_ SSD performance was comparable to RAM, there would be no need for the latter. 2. I have very rarely swapped on my 16Gb M1 Air, and when I did I only noticed later when looking back at graphs. I'm sure there was a performance hit but I never felt it. > Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. I do plenty of actual, professional use on my 16Gb M1 Air. Right now I have 3 VS Code windows open compiling Go code, running acceptance tests and whatnot. I also have Mail, Safari (with tens of tabs) and Firefox (with >100 tabs) open. A few minutes ago I also had Slack open on it. I regularly start iTerm to do terminal tasks. You must have an Intel machine. I had a powerful fully specced 32Gb i9 16" MBP. This cheap and humble 16Gb passively cooled M1 blows it right out of the water in every single aspect. It's even better at running Intel Docker images!
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
- alsetmusic 4y ago
  You’re describing your results on an Intel Mac. They aren’t relevant to this particular bit of the discussion. And, owning two different M1 laptops, I concur that the relationship between the RAM and SSD and M1 SoC yields fundamentally different results from prior hardware. The result is stunning.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    What relationship would that be? The DDR4x ram in the M1 can hit 70gb/sec, compared to 7gb/sec and ~3.5gb/sec average for the NVME. There's no amount of magic to get around those facts.
    - stouset 4y ago
      I'm a professional systems programmer. I agree with everything you're saying, in principle. Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools. These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient. I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days. Alien technology.
      - shitlord 4y ago
        The RTX 3080 is a massive power hog. All that energy has to be dissipated somehow. It's really impressive what Apple has managed to do with the M1 and M2 chips. If an Apple M chip ever offers comparable performance on AAA games, I'll get rid of my desktop computer.
- postalrat 4y ago
  Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    > Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I never said it was. I said _if_ it was, we wouldn't need RAM.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    What tops out at 8gb by the way? The previous gen Air gos up to 16Gb, and this gen's goes up to 24Gb.
    - diffeomorphism 4y ago
      Their website presentation tops out at 8. If I go to their store website it shows me only two options: - 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256 - 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512 No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model. I thought apple was supposed to be good at UX?
      - Schiendelman 4y ago
        It says “configure yours on the next step.”
        diffeomorphism 4y ago
        Not in German, no. And even then, how would you know that ram is confugurable?
        4y ago
- 127 4y ago
  Destroying the resale value of your laptop because trashing through a non-replacable SSD is not something I would really appreciate. We don't have(?) official numbers, but consumer SSDs go as low as 150TBW
bastardoperator 4y ago
I have an M1 macbook air and it's flipping fast with insane battery life. It's giving my employers 6K US Dollars Intel Macbook Pro a run for its money at a fraction of the cost.
ppeetteerr 4y ago
Speed _is_ all that matters. Who cares what the hardware is as long as it responds quickly to my commands?
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  The killer feature of the M1 chip is actually performance-per-watt, not outright performance/speed. It does not help to oversimplify things.
coldtea 4y ago
>Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years That's just some handwaving complain that doesn't mean much. >What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? Try - opening 2 Linux/Windows VMs on that 2012 laptop - or opening a big Logic project with 100 tracks, convolution reverbs, high end AU/VSTs, and so on - or opening and editing several 8K, ney, 4K video streams, and slap some VFX nodes on them... - or running a programming IDE like Idea - or compiling a large C++ codebase ... and several other tasks, and compare running the same on the 2022 machine. Since "software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years" it should be comparable, right?
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  I don't understand the point you are trying to make here. I wish you luck getting a 2022 Apple machine with 8GB of RAM to handle 2 VMs, IntelliJ, a logic project with 100 tracks or 4K video editing. These tasks are all limited by available RAM and the available RAM has not significantly increased since 2012 (my point).
  - standyro 4y ago
    I definitely have used multiple VMs in VirtualBox and Docker on a daily basis on my Macbook Air M1. It's a phenomenal machine.
    - dijit 4y ago
      With 8gb? I am aware that macOS is better than Linux with low memory conditions but I can’t imagine this, granted I have an older (2020) MacBook Pro, but I have ran out of ram and I specifically opted for the 32G one. As in: I got the infamous “your system is low on memory” dialog. All it took was teams, slack, chrome, MS word, docker (vm with default config) and 2 1G VMs invirtualbox
      - Schiendelman 4y ago
        The M1 machines have hardware compression on data going into memory. It goes very very far.

hxegon 4y ago

Generally won't be swapping that often I would think, but besides the point because swap with SSDs (that are as good as the ones in MBs) isn't a big performance hit like it used to be. Swap also doesn't degrade SSD lifetimes like it used to.

cassianoleal 4y ago

> a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. > What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.

petercooper 4y ago
In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all! Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Ah beat me to it! The idea that Mx swapping to NVME is essentially no-op from performance perspective is patently wrong.
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    I don't know what people are reading into my comment. I said _if_ SSD speeds were comparable to RAM, RAM wouldn't be needed. The reason we need it is precisely because disk is slower and cheaper.
    - girvo 4y ago
      I think people just want to argue, so they half read your comment.
pxmpxm 4y ago
Apple must've spent a fortune on marketing bamboozlement ("you don't need as much RAM with apple silicone") that even people on HN now seem to parrot it. NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall. As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  > Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. Plenty of people will be more than happy with 8GB of RAM on an M1. I had a base model M1 Mac Mini and it worked great even for gaming. Obviously if you're running VMs or editing video or doing any other memory intense workload you're going to need more memory. But for anyone who doesn't need an absurd (>16gb) amount of memory (college students, many programmers, those who use computers just for web browsing and Netflix), 8GB or 16GB will feel snappy.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > even people on HN now seem to parrot it. There's no need for personal attacks. > as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall. Yes, probably. Two points though: 1. My comment was that _if_ SSD performance was comparable to RAM, there would be no need for the latter. 2. I have very rarely swapped on my 16Gb M1 Air, and when I did I only noticed later when looking back at graphs. I'm sure there was a performance hit but I never felt it. > Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb. I do plenty of actual, professional use on my 16Gb M1 Air. Right now I have 3 VS Code windows open compiling Go code, running acceptance tests and whatnot. I also have Mail, Safari (with tens of tabs) and Firefox (with >100 tabs) open. A few minutes ago I also had Slack open on it. I regularly start iTerm to do terminal tasks. You must have an Intel machine. I had a powerful fully specced 32Gb i9 16" MBP. This cheap and humble 16Gb passively cooled M1 blows it right out of the water in every single aspect. It's even better at running Intel Docker images!
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
alsetmusic 4y ago
You’re describing your results on an Intel Mac. They aren’t relevant to this particular bit of the discussion. And, owning two different M1 laptops, I concur that the relationship between the RAM and SSD and M1 SoC yields fundamentally different results from prior hardware. The result is stunning.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  What relationship would that be? The DDR4x ram in the M1 can hit 70gb/sec, compared to 7gb/sec and ~3.5gb/sec average for the NVME. There's no amount of magic to get around those facts.
  - stouset 4y ago
    I'm a professional systems programmer. I agree with everything you're saying, in principle. Except I have two M1 MacBook Pros (one 16GB, one 64GB). I frankly don't notice the difference between the two on any workload. This involves compiling multiple projects, running multiple docker containers locally in virtual machines, running VS Code, Slack, Chrome, and other productivity tools. These machines frankly feel like alien fucking technology and I don't say that lightly. I'm used to year-over-year improvements being almost unnoticeable. These machines feel like I've jumped ten or more years forward in performance and responsiveness. And they do so while barely generating heat. My previous Intel MBP would make my home office hot just by being in a Zoom call. When I first got my M1 MBP, I left it running all night performing a SIMD-heavy pure math workload pegging every core at 100%. Not only was it faster, but the room wasn't even perceptibly warmer than ambient. I have a gaming PC next to my work area. Zen 9 3950X, GeForce 3080, 64GB of DDR-4000 RAM, and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The fans go blazing and I start sweating just booting Windows. And unless I'm doing something in VR, it performs comparably to the MacBook Pro. I barely turn the damn thing on these days. Alien technology.
    - shitlord 4y ago
      The RTX 3080 is a massive power hog. All that energy has to be dissipated somehow. It's really impressive what Apple has managed to do with the M1 and M2 chips. If an Apple M chip ever offers comparable performance on AAA games, I'll get rid of my desktop computer.
postalrat 4y ago
Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  > Disk can have high transfer speeds but access time isn't at all comparable to ram. I never said it was. I said _if_ it was, we wouldn't need RAM.
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  What tops out at 8gb by the way? The previous gen Air gos up to 16Gb, and this gen's goes up to 24Gb.
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    Their website presentation tops out at 8. If I go to their store website it shows me only two options: - 8 core, 8 core gpu, 8gb, 256 - 8 core, 10 core gpu, 8gb, 512 No indication whatsoever that this 8gb is not fixed. Nor is the storage fixed. But the only way to find out is to try and buy it, at which point I can just turn the first model into the second or something else entirely. Also, none of the presented options is anywhere close in price to the top spec model. I thought apple was supposed to be good at UX?
    - Schiendelman 4y ago
      It says “configure yours on the next step.”
      - diffeomorphism 4y ago
        Not in German, no. And even then, how would you know that ram is confugurable?
        4y ago
127 4y ago
Destroying the resale value of your laptop because trashing through a non-replacable SSD is not something I would really appreciate. We don't have(?) official numbers, but consumer SSDs go as low as 150TBW

bastardoperator 4y ago

I have an M1 macbook air and it's flipping fast with insane battery life. It's giving my employers 6K US Dollars Intel Macbook Pro a run for its money at a fraction of the cost.

ppeetteerr 4y ago

Speed _is_ all that matters. Who cares what the hardware is as long as it responds quickly to my commands?

grumpyprole 4y ago
The killer feature of the M1 chip is actually performance-per-watt, not outright performance/speed. It does not help to oversimplify things.

coldtea 4y ago

>Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years That's just some handwaving complain that doesn't mean much. >What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly? Try - opening 2 Linux/Windows VMs on that 2012 laptop - or opening a big Logic project with 100 tracks, convolution reverbs, high end AU/VSTs, and so on - or opening and editing several 8K, ney, 4K video streams, and slap some VFX nodes on them... - or running a programming IDE like Idea - or compiling a large C++ codebase ... and several other tasks, and compare running the same on the 2022 machine. Since "software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years" it should be comparable, right?

grumpyprole 4y ago
I don't understand the point you are trying to make here. I wish you luck getting a 2022 Apple machine with 8GB of RAM to handle 2 VMs, IntelliJ, a logic project with 100 tracks or 4K video editing. These tasks are all limited by available RAM and the available RAM has not significantly increased since 2012 (my point).
- standyro 4y ago
  I definitely have used multiple VMs in VirtualBox and Docker on a daily basis on my Macbook Air M1. It's a phenomenal machine.
  - dijit 4y ago
    With 8gb? I am aware that macOS is better than Linux with low memory conditions but I can’t imagine this, granted I have an older (2020) MacBook Pro, but I have ran out of ram and I specifically opted for the 32G one. As in: I got the infamous “your system is low on memory” dialog. All it took was teams, slack, chrome, MS word, docker (vm with default config) and 2 1G VMs invirtualbox
    - Schiendelman 4y ago
      The M1 machines have hardware compression on data going into memory. It goes very very far.