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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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