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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

Did you take into account the different RAM architecture? Sure you can get bigger RAM, but that’s not nearly the same as what the M series offers (and it shows on benchmarks) - you might be better off with a 16GB MacBook, than a 32GB other laptop. Oh, and it’s not like this form factor/higher quality displays, etc would be cheap by other manufacturers.

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It's on-die, but it's not really any faster. The latency and bandwidth are pretty OK by today's standards. I suspect it's on-die because M1/M2 grew out of mobile CPUs. You might be referring to fast SSDs, but that's mainly true only for Pro versions. People who need >32 GB RAM usually know why they need it, you cannot really be running simulations out of your SSD swap. I'm not saying it's a proper use-case for a MacBook, I'm just saying that this guy might have some special requirements that do not align well with Apple laptops price-wise.

Bandwidth on the macs is pretty good. M2 = 100GB/sec peak, M2 pro = 200GB/sec peak, M2 Max = 400GB/sec peak.

A $3k lenovo thinkpad p16 uses DDR4-4800 or 76.8GB/sec peak. That also ignores the arm relaxes memory model, which means you get (on average) a greater fraction of peak bandwidth when running something memory intensive.

So apple does 1.3x, 2.6x, or 5.2x better. On a desktop you can get another 2x with the M1 Extreme. Seems quite a bit better than "Pretty ok", it's a big part of why the apple's get great GPU performance compared to Intel/AMD laptops with an iGPU and run at a small fraction of the power of the dGPUs used in laptops.

RAMs on M1 are in separate die in the same package. This let's Apple make fewer die SKUs, as well as use differently optimize die processes.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...

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