512GB SSD both M1 air and M2 air, which is outperform?

[Chukachuka]

I do prefer air to carry around and the midnight color of M2.
How about 512GB ram 16 GPU 7-core (M1 air) vs
512GB ram 8 GPU 8-core (M2 air) vs
512GB ram 16 GPU 8-core (M2 air) vs
512GB ram 8 GPU 10-core (M2 air), which better? Does there has a huge difference?
I do open 10 tabs, multitasking with *just a little* (rarely) of 3d rendering, photoshop and video editing. Which one is fit for me?

 

[Dealmans]

 

[ian87w]

From your list, I would go with the 16/512/8-core GPU M2 Air. It will give you probably best bang for your buck. Seems to be the sweet spot for the M2 Macbook Air.

Why not the M1? Without the SSD bottleneck, the M2 is faster, period. 512GB models won't have the SSD issue so go with M2.
Why not the 10-core GPU? Because of potential faster throttling. More cores means more heat when they are turned on, so the 10-core GPU, although can be faster, but might throttle quicker. Just a theory though. Hopefully MaxTech will do a comparison soon.

Don't bother with 8GB of RAM models.

 

[wbeasley]

From your list, I would go with the 16/512/8-core GPU M2 Air. It will give you probably best bang for your buck. Seems to be the sweet spot for the M2 Macbook Air.

Why not the M1? Without the SSD bottleneck, the M2 is faster, period. 512GB models won't have the SSD issue so go with M2.
Why not the 10-core GPU? Because of potential faster throttling. More cores means more heat when they are turned on, so the 10-core GPU, although can be faster, but might throttle quicker. Just a theory though. Hopefully MaxTech will do a comparison soon.

Don't bother with 8GB of RAM models.

given the original poster says most work is 10 tabs open, we can assume they surf the web. light work. an 8 core GPU is probably fine given Firefox I have running on a 8GB/256GB Air is using only 2% GPU currently.

Firefox is however a memory hog. two tabs open and chewing 880MB of the 8GB.
More worrying is the 1.5GB of disk it using. What the???
Maybe I should open same pages in Safari or Chrome and compare the resource use...

Dismissing the 8GB machine given the usage described seems a bit like upselling that probably wont deliver them any noticably difference performance.

 

[ian87w]

given the original poster says most work is 10 tabs open, we can assume they surf the web. light work. an 8 core GPU is probably fine given Firefox I have running on a 8GB/256GB Air is using only 2% GPU currently.

Firefox is however a memory hog. two tabs open and chewing 880MB of the 8GB.
More worrying is the 1.5GB of disk it using. What the???
Maybe I should open same pages in Safari or Chrome and compare the resource use...

Dismissing the 8GB machine given the usage described seems a bit like upselling that probably wont deliver them any noticably difference performance.

Modern OS are getting a lot of background services running to deal with all the "integration." Just booting the OS itself doesn't mean the system is not already multi-tasking. And modern websites and caching can take a lot of RAM. The typical "light" internet use of today is not only email, but watching 4K youtube while having cloud-based productivity apps, chat apps, music app, photo viewing, etc open. That's "light" usage of today.

I mean I have a machine with 8GB of RAM, and I only have Zoom open (not used) and Brave with 7 tabs (one of them is Youtube), Google Drive and OneDrive applet for syncing, and it's already using up 7GB of RAM.