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Comment by purephase | Hacker News Reader

Getting buyers remorse since I just picked up the i9 macbook pro. I passed on the M1 since I need the RAM. I just wish you could use 32gb with the initial release.

It sounds like it's coming in the new few months now. I just couldn't hold out. Oh well.

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I did the same thing but my wife got the m1 8gb: after trying it out and seeing similar performance for a fraction of the price, I rapidly sold my i9. Just in time as here prices for Intel macs are dropping fast.

because of the fundamental difference in architecture, one should not compare ram size of an intel based mac against the ram of a M1 based mac.

it's like comparing fuel tank sizes between two cars when one of them has a much more fuel efficient engine.

Does the M1 make programs use less RAM somehow?

I don’t know how, but similar workloads between my intel MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air show about half the ram usage on the M1

The M1 seems to be designed around the retain/release cycles that are at the core of everything Apple has been building on going all the way back to NeXTSTEP

https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1326238434235568128?s...

This tweet has nothing to do with RAM usage. Maybe about the performance of (uncontended) atomic operations if I'm reading this corectly.

possibly yes due to how it now sits closer to the cpu and other components. Utilization is also different.

See: https://www.howtogeek.com/701804/how-unified-memory-speeds-u...

the current concern is how all these impact SSD(harddisk) life and health due to how swap memory is managed. It may be the reason why Apple priced such a breakthrough technology so competitively.

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