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That’s because Apple Silicon has a stupid-wide memory bus. It has little/nothing to do with the characteristics of the memory chips shipped in the box. They jus
by labcomputer 3y ago
That’s because Apple Silicon has a stupid-wide memory bus. It has little/nothing to do with the characteristics of the memory chips shipped in the box. They just put more modules in parallel than on x86.
Apple could ship cheaper memory modules with the same stupid-wide bus and achieve nearly the same performance for a fraction of the cost.
And that’s what I want. Give me 4x as much DDR4 on the same 1024 bit wide bus, and I’d be happy.
- sliken 3y agoStupid wide? Pins, memory controllers, and traces (and layers) on motherboards aren't cheap. Apple just decided that the paying memory bandwidth was worth it. Is there some reason why you think the extra memory bandwidth was stupid? Sure it's easy to ask for 1024 bit wide memory bus, but it's not cheap. Done with the traditional x86-64 method you'll need two 280 watt CPUs (a few $k each), on a $1k motherboard, with 24 dimms, a 1kw power supply, ear plugs, and at least $10k. The minimum physical size is going to be substantial since you need two large CPU sockets (6096 pins each), 24 dimm sockets, and of course a substantial number of fans, dimms, and power supply. Even managing airflow over 800 watts or so of chips isn't going to be easy, cheap, or quiet. Because of the above size, cost, noise, and heat it's targeted at enterprise and cloud folks with the related cost, service contract, and sales pipelines. Or you could buy an Apple studio and hide it somewhere, you'll likely not be able to find it by listening for it.