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Comment by waingake | Hacker News Reader

> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform.

How nice of Apple. #snarc

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#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.

It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.

That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.

That's... comically untrue. The Playstation 5 has faster memory than the M1 (448gb/s vs 200), and it was manufactured by AMD before Zen 3 or Apple Silicon even shipped. Dual-channel DDR5 should smoke the LPDDR4X in Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth.

How so?

Memory bandwidth (peak, not stream)

  Ryzen 7950x =  84GB/sec #  128 bit wide ddr5-5200
  M1 =           66GB/sec #  128 bit wide ddr5-4800
  M2 =          100GB/sec #  128 bit wide ddr5-6400
  M1/M2 Pro =   200GB/sec #  256 bit wide
  M1/M2 Max =   400GB/sec #  512 bit wide
  M1 Ultra  =   800GB/sec # 1024 bit wide, m2 ultra not out

800GB/sec / 84 = 9.5. Although the ARM64 has a more relaxed memory ordering and generally you see a greater fraction of peak in the real world. Also Mac's default to a 16kb page, which helps the TLB with random workloads. Memory bandwidth is part of why the Apple iGPU does so well when compared to Intel and AMDs best iGPUs. Similarly the improved memory system is why the PS5 and XboxX does so well on games.

Sadly AMD is reserved the improved memory system for the XboxX and PS5. Both AMD and Intel limit laptops and normal desktops (except for the expensive HEDT segment like the Threadripper) to 128 wide memory.

The latest Intel/AMD non-HEDT memory controllers only have two channels, so your DDR5 would drop to below-DDR4 speeds if you put 128GB DDR5 in it.

(32GB dual rank sticks * 4 -- there are no 64GB DDR5 sticks yet. Some reports of system instability with all four DDR5 slots populated, too, even when running at DDR4 speeds, it seems the motherboard manufacturers aren't QAing it.)

Nope, that's the cost of a monopoly. However fast or special Apple's RAM is, it doesn't cost them 10x the price of the competition, it costs us that because we can't around shop for another supplier.

It does cost quite a bit more though. Otherwise everyone would ship 1k bit wide memory interfaces instead of 128 bit wide.

Just look at the premium AMD and Intel charge for 256 bit wide memory, let alone 1024 bit wide. Xeon servers have 512 bit wide memory, AMD Epycs in the newest gen have 768. Apple's unique in having a 1024 bit wide memory interface, at least among commodity hardware.

To be fair, what you're getting is a hardware configuration that "just works." By controlling the hardware configuration, the manufacturer is controlling the user experience. Yes, components like storage and memory are built to standards but interoperability problems do come up.

By controlling components/configs, they (Apple) doesn't have to field angry tech support calls and go down rabbit holes as to why a random RAM manufacturer's DIMMs don't work with my machine.

Apple also does this with thunderbolt products, which have a very strict certification process so that user in theory should have a user experience where the products "just work."

Have you ever bought a non-Apple computer? When hardware fails it’s not because the configuration “just dont work”, it’s because crappy OEMs ship garbage quality components that die, and when you buy one of those machines it’s really a race to see what fails first: an internal component or one of the poorly designed external components made of shitty plastic.

But that’s only for the cheap computers (a market Apple doesn’t serve). Most machines in the $800+ range offer excellent value and reliability (except Dell).

> By controlling components/configs, they (Apple) doesn't have to field angry tech support calls and go down rabbit holes as to why a random RAM manufacturer's DIMMs don't work with my machine.

I think you severely overestimate the number of people who install aftermarket parts into their computers. Furthermore, Apple offsetting the cost of tech support by overcharging customers for hardware is really shitty. Maybe if you’re a shareholder then that’s a positive statement, but this thread about pricing is obviously from a consumer perspective.

ALSO, it’s ignoring the fact that Apple’s answer to any tech support question is “buy a new one”. So whatever they’re doing with that extra money, it’s not going into tech support.

Why should I pay 10x RAM prices? Because nobody else can sell RAM for Apple’s latest computers, and nobody else can compete directly with those computers yet, and Apple is taking full advantage of that.

If a competitor starts offering comparable hardware, they’ll be able to significantly undercut Apple simply by offering RAM (and storage) at reasonable prices. Until then, Apple will be emptying wallets.

Once again reminding folk to still be angry at AMD for giving up on HDET. Sucks so bad that one has to go server to get >128bit ram. So sad, such a bad limitation.

Heh, well, seems silly to have a 2 channel standard, 4 channel standard, and TWO 8 channel standards. The volumes don't justify it, and it's just a big waste of money. It contributes to expensive motherboards among other things.

Seems like Intel and AMD are heading towards an 8 channel standard and the cheaper chips will enable only 4 of those channels.

if you need AVX-512 ( x86-64-v4 ) then Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache is also good alternative.

"AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance"

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen9-7950x3d-linux

"From the nearly 400 benchmarks, when taking the geo mean the 7950X3D was at 97% the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X while on average being at 60% the power consumption rate. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D in these non-gaming workloads was 11% faster than the Intel Core i9 13900K and at around 60% the power."

"AMD Unveils Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Up to 128 MB of L3 Cache And 5.7 GHz Boost"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18709/amd-unveils-ryzen-9-795...

HN Thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34260253

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