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>The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.
by KVFinn 4y ago
>The current Mac Pro supports up to 1.5TB of RAM and with DDR5 memory capacities about to increase, I wonder how Apple will compensate for the much lower RAM.
Probably by just not supporting that market. But maybe they could implement some kind of Optane/CXL type SSD-as-memory solution?
- tanelpoder 4y agoOr just support additional memory boards, full of DRAM DIMMs, plugged into PCIe slots, accessed over CXL protocol (no need to use Optane, Intel killed it off anyway).
- techdragon 4y agoThey would have to give up on the “unified memory architecture” (their terms) and sacrifice some of the simplicity they get by being able to not care about anything important Being outside the one big pool of fast addressable memory. This would have major impact on their GPU firmware/drivers as it would now need to handle data in the CXL hardware… all if this is extremely normal in the PC / wider hardware world, but Apple are going down the hardware optimisation path like consoles used to, and this overhead can be cut quickly to get the kind of gains that have made the M1 generation seem so much better than the previous intel hardware. In essence, if they aren’t going to enable high power GPU compute (external AMD/Nvidia cards) for things like machine learning and parallel physics simulations in many industries various analysis software suites… then there’s little to be gained from anything remotely like this, CXL or otherwise.