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Most of the reviewers don't seem to understand the concept of swapping. The SSD in the new macs is fast enough you don't (or hardly) notice when the OS swaps and so they think 8 gb is enough. While this may be fine for regular users I wouldn't recommend it for professionals.

That's a great point. And we maybe should grant that if they really do not notice that swapping, that it is an argument for less ram working better than one would usually expect for their usage.

And right, it's professional usage where that would fall short, I doubt that it would help as much when the image file I open fills the ram completely or when parts of the IDE are swapped away.

> It's not worlds better than a Ryzen 5 5600X or its mobile variant

Maybe if you're solely focused on performance.

But the other reason why M1 is so ground breaking is because it offers this performance with ~2x the battery life and minimal cooling compared to its competitors.

I think everyone is aware of the battery life / minimal heat dissipation of the Apple Silicon processor. The grandparent comment was specifically quoting and refuting this line:

> Given the little chance Intel or anyone else is going to keep up with this new level of performance

That line is strictly true in a thermally constrained machine such as a laptop.

Hi, I'm the author. English is my second language and by performance I assumed the overall performance within all the constraints, that is, temperature, noise, and battery included. If I was to type everything explicitly, the article would be very exact, but very long and hard to read. The exactness wasn't so important in this sentence, as I think it's clear I'm aware of how it is given I earlier mentioned I enjoyed articles where this is considered and explained.

I think I was agreeing with you.

The M1 is on a 5nm process from TSMC. I'm sure if AMDs Zen 3 (eg Ryzen 5600x) was also on that process instead of 7nm the perf/power ratio would be similar

I think the reviewer is mostly right though. The M1 uses unified memory where the CPU, GPU, the neural processor, and other components can access the same data without copying it.

"All of the technologies in the SoC can access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory. This dramatically improves performance and power efficiency. Video apps are snappier. Games are richer and more detailed. Image processing is lightning fast. And your entire system is more responsive."

Of course if you need 12 GB of data in memory than sharing 8 GB won't be enough but for most current uses of 16 GB its possible that 8 GB could feel as responsive between the shared memory and the faster access speeds (due to faster components and smaller distances)

HSA has been a thing since 2015:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_System_Archite...

Sure but Intel doesn't support it right so it wasn't in use for MacBooks as far as I understand. I'm not saying Apple invented the concept but they implemented it in their laptops for the first time so you logically wouldn't need as much RAM for many use cases where you can share memory that you couldn't share before.

Yeah but there hasn't been the level of vertical integration that the M1 laptop has before. The same company is building the silicon, the laptop and the OS they can leverage whatever they feel like and don't have to account for processors that have differing features.

No. Just no.

Care to elaborate...?

Hi, I'm the author. I have limited budget and made a trade-off. I just decided it's less probable I'll run out of RAM given its performance and my usage of the computer, than that I'll run out of disk space. That's all.

It's easy to type a comment about bad decisions and garbage, but the world doesn't work in terms of absolute truths, the decisions we make are made under certain circumstances and the success of the results is subjective. I risked something, I know it, so far I'm happy with my choice.

Hey, please don't be hung up on the garbage word - after all it's just a description what the laptop will be at some point in the future. An earlier future than necessary. My beef is not with you, but I am annoyed with Apple selling devices that are not upgradeable. If they would just be reasonable and let users upgrade their ram, the laptop would continue to be useful when (not if) more than the current minimum of acceptable system memory is needed.

Given how overpriced the bigger memory configurations are I understand why you took that risk.

The earlier parts of my comment just reflect my impression that you overestimate the performance of that laptop compared to available alternatives. 10x faster is just not accurate. Remember the context: A huge group of Apple fanboys that buy everything the company produces without being aware of the alternatives and drawbacks. That's why it feels important to point out misconceptions like that, whether they are really there or just the interpretation.

I’ve noticed on my M1 air that even when it’s swapping the performance impact isn’t that noticeable. I wouldn’t be surprised if 8gb falls short once we can run VMs but I’ve found it to be adequate for everything else.

For $1000 the base model Air is a hell of a machine.

The processor is not a magical thing that changes how much memory is needed for workloads. When the first reviewers did not look at your workload it's meaningless that they did not complain.

People sometimes forget that macOS has had automatic RAM compression since Mavericks (10.9) [1]. Think about how fast this must be using Apple's SoC combined with the extremely fast SSD at 2190 MB/s writes and 2675 MB/s reads. With compression, the effective speed is at least double.

It would take a whole lot for there to be any appreciable slowdown running lots of apps simultaneously with 8 GB of RAM.

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/understanding-compressed-memory-os-...

RAM compression implemented in hardware with proprietary extensions to the ARM ISA for their algorithm.

>RAM compression implemented in hardware

That's what I'm thinking.

When I first got my new 8gb Air there was some indexing process running for a while that was using 6gb. The machine was a bit slower but still quite responsive. I think there’s some truth to the claim that you need to think about ram a little bit differently with this new hardware.

When I first got my new 8gb Air there was some indexing process running for a while that was using 6gb.

That's Spotlight indexing the email, PDFs, Word files, etc. on your hard drive. Once it's done, your Mac will be much more responsive: https://www.macworld.com/article/3388134/spotlight-dont-take...

RAM is probably one of most the underrated things in the world at the moment. Anyone who are remotely familiar with how OS works would definitely get as much RAM as possible. Virtually it's like the cash of the virtual world (pardon the pun), the more you have the better you are.

Having said that, according to the article "Intel’s Disruption is Now Complete" discussed in HN before, Intel's lowest end of Celeron CPU line was introduced just to delay the inevitable [1][2]. But what the article did not mention is that Intel purposely crippled its low end CPU with the minimum amount of RAM. Until very recently the most RAM you can get with Celeron based processors is only a few GBs. However, perhaps due to the competition of AMD and other ARM based manufacturers, Intel has done the unthinkable and with the latest Gold processor series (11th Gen) you can have up to 128GB of RAM [3][4]. FYI, the Gold processor series is conveniently placed in between the Core and Celeron back in 2016 and essentially it's a beefed up Celeron. Not only that, it can now supports Optane, a new Intel's proprietary non-volatile or persistent memory technology that can provide its lower end CPUs with potentially more than TB of working memory [5]. Imagine using a tablet/PC/home server in the year 2021 having an equivalent of humongous terabytes of RAM!

[1]https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721

[3]https://newsroom.intel.com/news/iot-processors-industrial-ed...

[4]https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199288/...

[5]https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...

RAM is pretty power hungry. Like everything there’s a cost and “moar RAM” is not the solution to all problems when you’re thermally constrained and standby battery lifetime is important.

Really wishing Apple would release a 32 GB model. After virtualization lands, I would jump onboard in a heartbeat. I have 16 GB right now, but I have to delegate important experiments to a server which is annoying.

It is expected that next year they will release their M2 chip to support the 14/16" MacBook Pro and iMac.

And then likely 2022 we see the M3 chip for the Mac Pro, Mac mini Pro and iMac Pro.

The pro should be out shortly.

Virtualization is already here; Docker and QEMU have been in testing for a little while.

Apple is ten times better at planning future generation hardware than all other counter part, I believe they are already planning for much bigger M2 M3 chips. I truly think other will have real hard time catching up with apple on performance front anytime soon or ever.

I would expect them to do so, but there is another solution: you can use a remote desktop on a beefy server and run your programs there and then use it from a nice portable machine.

I think Mac has their own, but I use NoMachine and it basically just works and can work with different client and server OSes. On the client side it is just video decoding so it is not very demanding - and it uses less bandwidth than I would think.

If most machines only have only 8G ram, it compels app developers to pay more attention to memory usage. This is a good thing. That said, there are plenty of other usages that just need a lot RAM and these folks are holding off on upgrading.

Apple already working on adding many core (~32) and tons of ram (256gb) by two three generations, so if no body else, Apple itself will force for the upgrade.

> The processor is not a magical thing that changes how much memory is needed for workloads.

Yeah, that line made me take the entire review less seriously.

I think the reviewer is mostly right though. The M1 uses unified memory where the CPU, GPU, the neural processor, and other components can access the same data without copying it.

"All of the technologies in the SoC can access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory. This dramatically improves performance and power efficiency. Video apps are snappier. Games are richer and more detailed. Image processing is lightning fast. And your entire system is more responsive."

That doesn't mean you need less RAM. That reviewer doesn't know what he's talking about.

If you assert that without discussing any of the points that I brought up then its not very useful. Why wouldn't sharing memory for certain large objects instead of copying them not make memory usage more efficient for many tasks?

> CPU, GPU, the neural processor, and other components

Outside of the CPU, you're really not using the other processors for "many tasks."

Well the storage is also integrated and most tasks use at least CPU + storage so those will benefit too. Not to mention if you don't use your GPU much then the memory can now be dynamically allocated to the CPU instead of remaining with the GPU. Intel has integrated graphics cards that share system RAM but that RAM is slower than traditional graphics RAM so they have terrible performance.

Just not how it works, but I don't really feel like engaging in an argument. Technical readers of this chain will know who is right.

Then why comment at all? There was no argument, I was literally trying to reason how it could not be better and you chose to be rude instead of providing a single technical detail

The unified memory actually means more RAM usage as textures that would only exist in the GPU RAM now have to live in the unified RAM. Unified memory is a great performance improvement but I don't think it translates into lower RAM usage.

I agree not in all cases.

What if you are barely using that GPU though? Wouldn’t most the GPU RAM just be wasted while you did CPU intensive tasks?

Likewise in your example you might be using the GPU more so less RAM could now be allocated to the CPU to improve GPU performance by more efficiently using the available RAM

Hi, I'm the author. I've read about how they constructed the RAM and how it's different from the usual architecture. That and YouTube reviews convinced me that if I should save money on something, I could risk it with RAM. I observed how my potato Macbook works with its 8 GB RAM and I could see that most of the capacity is idle, while the computer is slow. That made me think that RAM just isn't the bottle neck I'm fighting. My budget is limited and based on what I knew I decided the RAM is less of a risk than a small disk.

In the end, honestly, I don't care that much if it's the processor, RAM, or a pixie dust. The machine's snappy whatever I do on it and that's all that matters. I'm happy with my choice so far, but only time will tell, of course. If you do RAM-intensive stuff on your computer and have the money, buy RAM, good for you.

> The processor is not a magical thing that changes how much memory is needed for workloads.

But this isn't completely true. ARM compiles down to significantly smaller binaries than x86, because it doesn't have to support legacy extensions.[1]

[1] http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/papers/iccd09/ll_document...

Does it? Most if not all of those graphs seem to have x86 pegged even or denser than ARM?

Edit: you may be reading IA64 by accident