Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.
Comment on 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
Synthead@lemmy.world 1 year ago
RAM is RAM. If you’re able to manage it better, that’s nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it’s 2x as “efficient?”
thejml@lemm.ee 1 year ago
olympicyes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.
thejml@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m specifically talking about the in memory compression, not swap.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But memory compression works the same way swap works. When memory is needed LRU page is
written on diskcompressed, and where application needs to read data from compressed page it generates pagefault and OS loads(decompresses) page in memory. That’s it.
Sylvartas@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression on its own since 98SE or something
thejml@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They actually just it in Windows 10. There were third party add ons to do so prior to then, but they had marginal impact from my experience.
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Did you know that you could do RAM compression on “old” MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.
NIB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max’s ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
Most of the things that “use” ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.
azuth@lemmy.world 1 year ago
RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.
Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.
at_an_angle@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I have a tank that can hold 500 gallons of water. It’s connected to a pumping system that can do 1000 gallons a minute on the discharge side. So it’s just as good as a 2000 gallon tank!
What do you mean incoming water? Look at my discharge rate!
uis@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What a bullshit I see.
BURN@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Of all the points in their blatantly wrong comment, this probably wasn’t the one to single out. The reason for the soldered RAM is due to speed and length of traces. The longer the trace, the more chance there is for signal loss. By soldering the Ram close to the cpu the traces are shorter, allowing for a minuscule improvement in latency.
To be clear, I don’t like it either. It’s one of the major things holding me back from buying a MacBook right now.
Synthead@lemmy.world 11 months ago
While this is true on paper, we don’t need to pretend that this is an unsolved problem in reality. It’s not like large-scale motherboard manufacturers simply refuse to put their RAM closer to the CPU, and it’s littered with data loss. Apple also didn’t do anything innovative by soldering the RAM onto their motherboards. This is simply bootlicking Apple for what’s actually planned obsolescence.
TwanHE@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same way itx boards are preferred for ram oc. But i doubt apple is pushing crazy timings and clocks.