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I've heard from people with M1 laptops that they perform surprisingly better than Intel laptops with less RAM (on the Mac). I imagine the same will hold with the Pro and Max, although it will depend a lot on what type of work you're doing.

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I am one of those people. I bought an 8gb M1 Air last month for a project (while I waited for the new models to be released). It baffles me how well this little computer performs with less RAM than I've had in a computer since 2009. I'd love an explanation of how that works. Maybe the SSD is so fast that swapping isn't a big deal?

I looked into this angle recently. The SSDs in the new MBPs are roughly 3x as fast as the one in my 2015 MBP (7.4GB/s vs 2GB/s). To contextualize, the new MBPs have roughly half as much SSD bandwidth as my MBP does memory bandwidth.

Which is to say the SSD is much closer to being as fast as RAM, which would explain why is subjectively can make better use of less memory.

Neat!

It’s also possible that they’re using more and better tricks from iOS to handle memory - in which case the Intel Macs might show similar results if given similar speed disks

What kind of tricks?

I have m1 air with 8Gb and I see that had to take 16Gb at least. Not sure about 32GB, but 16 is the minimum. Profile: JS, TS, Rust, sometimes Java.

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