Do those other base configurations of 8/512GB start at $1600?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If a van carrying 8 people is analogous to another van carrying 16 people, that first van must be twice as fast as the second. Apples silicon may be faster than PC's, but I don't think they are coming in at double the speed.
I bought a MacBook Air with 4GB in 2011. It was swapping like crazy back then already. Today it's completely unusable, the SSD wore out.
All I do is web browsing. Even with 16GB my 2016 MBP was swapping.
Now I have a 32GB M1(my employer paid for it), and that works fine. Would never dream of 8GB, what can you do with that without swapping? Can you even open the text editor? 😂
All I do is web browsing. Even with 16GB my 2016 MBP was swapping.
Now I have a 32GB M1(my employer paid for it), and that works fine. Would never dream of 8GB, what can you do with that without swapping? Can you even open the text editor? 😂
Maybe slightly - but I have yet to see this demonstrated convincingly and it is likely to be very dependent on workload. A gigabyte of data is a gigabyte of data, and even the fast SSDs in AS Macs are an order of magnitude slower than RAM, so if your application relies on swap memory then your processor is being slowed down by lack of RAM.
...but, as per the examples I posted, not often on "premium" laptops costing over $1000 - I'm looking at the UK HP site and the only 8/256 systems are under £600 RRP (often discounted to less). Apple simply doesn't have a horse in the << £1000 laptop race.
You can't really say that without looking at the distribution. You can always find a lousy deal if you shop around. The "big 3" PC sellers (with Apple typically sitting i 4th place) - HP, Dell and Lenovo all have better base RAM/storage specs and/or cheaper upgrades on their mid/high end laptops. Apple prices are up there with a handful of "boutique" suppliers like Microsoft (Windows may be massive, but MS hardware is way down the list in terms of market share) or Razer who basically seem to be tracking Apple's prices.
I guess that Razer are have found a niche targeting established Mac users who want better gaming performance and are accustomed to Apple prices, while Microsoft don't dare compete too much with OEM PC makers who are the cornerstone of their Windows empire - the Surface range seems to be mainly about making a 'showcase' system for Windows.
They're digging this old dinosaur up....
This is a RISC vs CISC discussion, which has been hammered to death, especially by Apple in the Motorola 386 to PowerPC transition to explain how RISC reduces reliance on V/SD-RAM, so you need less volatile memory.
It's mostly a moot argument, as both have their strengths and weaknesses.
However, unified memory completely removes the bottleneck of the instruction sets anyways, especially since x86 removed the North Bridge.
This is a RISC vs CISC discussion, which has been hammered to death, especially by Apple in the Motorola 386 to PowerPC transition to explain how RISC reduces reliance on V/SD-RAM, so you need less volatile memory.
It's mostly a moot argument, as both have their strengths and weaknesses.
However, unified memory completely removes the bottleneck of the instruction sets anyways, especially since x86 removed the North Bridge.
...and if it had the same 16GB of RAM that you'd get in most PCs in the same price range, it wouldn't be getting a bit sluggish. You're putting up with a sluggish machine simply because Apple wants to charge you $200 for $50 worth of extra RAM.
I read the patent. It says essentially what I did in more detail with each shader requesting a page in memory. If it doesn’t exist, the memory management unit (MMU) allocates a new page of the size requested. Once used, the page is deallocated for the rest of the system to use. Essentially the patent is saying that each of the numerous graphics shaders does not make only a single request, but rather a long series of requests that allows the MMU to allocate and release memory as needed, freeing up memory so it isn’t sitting idle, which is exactly what I said. Not sure what you’re disagreeing with me about.
M3 should start at 18 GB and M3 Pro 24 GB.
Anything less is a rip off considering how much you pay
Anything less is a rip off considering how much you pay
They already did that with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, exactly what you think they won’t do. They doubled the storage and increased the price accordingly. Maybe it was done to cover for the excess cost of other components (e.g. near doubling of the SoC’s cost and the telephoto camera), but Apple could have raised the price any time since the iPhone X was released, but didn’t. Now they bump up the specs but raise the price by exactly how much the bump in specs would have cost on last year’s iPhone 14 Pro Max. Coincidence? Doubt it. If they bump it up to 16/512, I guarantee the price will go up and they’ll point to last year’s upgrade cost and say it didn’t cost you any more than it would have cost you last year! Count on a price increase if and when they do.
The principally new contribution of Dynamic Caching is on-demand allocation of register space and on-core memory (threadgroup memory). Since GPU shaders cannot perform system RAM allocations, that part of the patent is either not yet implemented or it's not functionality that Apple exposes to developers yet (or maybe it is hidden for some internal functions like spilling state to RAM). Either way, the end effect stays the same. Since you cannot allocate system RAM on the GPU, Dynamic Caching won't help you. But it will help fitting more complex shaders onto a GPU core, which helps hiding latency better and thus improves performance (and we are already observing very impressive 50-60% improvements in Blender even without hardware raytracing).
Relevance? The example of the Surface Laptop with 8/512 was $1500 with a mere i7. Pretty close and MS uses crappier materials.
Was 8GB analogous to 16GB when the M1 Pro launched with 16 as the base?
I know, I bought 2 MacBook Pro's last week, both 15 inch 16GB RAM in mint condition, one with 1TB SSD and the other with 1TB SSD and caddy with 2TB SSD. Total cost 350 euro. Great Macs, for music production and live performance. Also bought an Air 2014 i7 and built a 2TB Samsung 970 plus in it. So I am happy with my old stuff, these machines are not bad at all, and I don't want to spend thousands of euro's to have the newest Mac. I rather spend that on RefX Nexus and Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Stylus RMX extended as I did. And these Mac's I have are powerful enough.
True, but they really should drop the 'Pro' from that model and just make it 'Mac Book'.
They had to in the Pro Max when keeping the Pro lower. Like the 8GB M3 MacBook Pro 14" couldn't have 16GB while the similarly priced 8GB 15" MacBook Air was also for sale. The whole range of devices needs to shift in synch.
Nothing you’ve said contradicts anything I’ve said, except for a few minor errors you’ve made. I still don’t know what you disagree with me about. You keep telling me things I already know, implying you’re disagreeing with me about something. They have no intention of exposing any of it to developers. They specifically said it was entirely done in hardware so no OS nor developer implementation is needed. The entire mechanism is “transparent” to developers. The whole logic is probably done in the memory controller. BTW, there is no system RAM. When someone says system RAM, that is defined as the standard memory available to the CPU, also implying there is dedicated graphics memory, which there isn’t. In the case of the M-series of chips, the unified memory is used by both the CPU and GPU. The GPU (or CPU) makes RAM requests to the MMU and the MMU allocates and deallocates accordingly.
