iFixit Tears Down Mac Studio and Studio Display

[chucker23n1]

You are aware of multiples levels of cache RAM, RAM, and swap space to SSD that the OS already has to deal with, right? And no, you don't end up with the slowest RAM level as the OS deals with all this, sheesh.

Did you even read my post?

 

[Unregistered 4U]

There are roughly 1.7 BILLION people who play PC games on this planet. If only 10% of them upgrade their PC in any way that is still 170 Million users upgrading their computers. The worldwide Mac usage rate as of 2018 was 100 million if I recall correctly.
The world may someday be an un-upgradable ARM only world but we aren't anywhere close to that now.

Maybe in the magic world of Apple yes people aren't upgrading because there hasn't been an upgradable machine that was reasonably affordable since the 2010 Mac Pro, but to count the entire PC world is laughable.

Just doing a quick search, GPU’s had a stellar year in 2021, but that only amounted to around 12.7 million cards shipped, total (discrete card only + discrete card as a part of a reseller’s product). That’s out of an industry wide shipment of 101 million GPU’s (soldered + discrete). When you consider that those are sell-in numbers, not sell-through, that means that the actual number of discrete GPU’s that actually went to customers is even lower than 12.7 million…

I’d never looked into this before, but if there ARE 1.7 BILLION PC Gamers, the vast majority are gaming with what came with the system.

 

[chucker23n1]

There were also 26 million concurrent users of Steam in late 2021.

So, active PC gamer enthusiasts are probably in the tens of millions.

Oh, and Microsoft estimates 1.5 billion active users of Windows. Absolutely no way all of those, let alone more, are "PC gamers" in the sense of "people who upgrade their RAM".

 

[OnawaAfrica]

Yep, so the SoC RAM might be like an extra, much much bigger, layer of cache RAM. Just like the main RAM at the moment, is in a way, like a layer of cache for the swap space on the SSD. Although, in the case of swap space, if the OS needs swap space on the SSD, then you have a problem, and you need more RAM.

If the Mac Pro M1 Extreme is, as presumed, limited to 256GB on-SoC, but has up to 6TB* of plug in RAM, then this idea of the SoC RAM being a "cache" layer, might actually make sense.

*The Intel Mac Pro has 12 slots of DDR4 with a max of 128GB per slot, thus the 1.5TB limit. The M1 Mac Pro should be DDR5, which currently has up to 512GB DIMMs, so if 12 slots, is 6TB, but could be 6 lots, so 3TB.

I'm not actually sure how much faster SoC RAM is compared to plug-in RAM, though, does anyone know? Surely it is nowhere near the difference between RAM and SSD speeds?

There won't a M1 Extreme. also the Mac Pro has a limit of 1.5TB cause of the Xeon CPU not because of the Ram Slots.
Now its of course not near the difference between ram and SSD but its a general law in Computer Electronic Engineering. The further the component is from the cpu the slower is the communication. But some Pipo doesn't seem to understand that here.

 

[InuNacho]

Just doing a quick search, GPU’s had a stellar year in 2021, but that only amounted to around 12.7 million cards shipped, total (discrete card only + discrete card as a part of a reseller’s product). That’s out of an industry wide shipment of 101 million GPU’s (soldered + discrete). When you consider that those are sell-in numbers, not sell-through, that means that the actual number of discrete GPU’s that actually went to customers is even lower than 12.7 million…

I’d never looked into this before, but if there ARE 1.7 BILLION PC Gamers, the vast majority are gaming with what came with the system.

Even if 12.7m GPUs were sold in 2021 that can only account for GPUs, not ram, drives, etc. You can't upgrade a GPU on a laptop and does that count for "refurbished" computers that come from secondary markets like ebay? I worked in an ITAD online storefront for years and nothing sold faster than a computer with even a minuscule amount of upgrades over stock.
Perhaps 10% of 1.7B is off but I'd wager the upgrade market is huge considering the amount of parts and marketplaces catering to people wanting to upgrade anything.

 

[chucker23n1]

I'd wager the upgrade market is huge

In absolute terms, sure. Relative to Computers? No.

considering the amount of parts and marketplaces catering to people wanting to upgrade anything.

What’s huge there are the margins.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I worked in an ITAD online storefront for years and nothing sold faster than a computer with even a minuscule amount of upgrades over stock.

Well, yeah. Used to be EVERYTHING was a desktop and upgrading was how things were done. Over the years, desktop sales have dropped while mobile systems have increased marketshare greatly. Anyone buying a desktop today probably STILL wants upgrades, but the entire desktop market is a lot smaller than it was even 5 years ago.

Perhaps 10% of 1.7B is off but I'd wager the upgrade market is huge considering the amount of parts and marketplaces catering to people wanting to upgrade anything.

Remember, even that 12.7 is higher than actual as it’s not “what made it to customers” it’s “what’s in the channel to be sold” most have sold, but there could be a few million in warehouses.

Even though I see ads, stories/articles, reviews about EVERY big upcoming discrete GPU in addition to stories about games that are being tweaked or released specifically to take advantage of those new features, those ads are going out to a very small group of folks. I may do a little searching to see what’s the top selling laptop across all the vendors. I think it could be even further enlightening.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

There won't a M1 Extreme. also the Mac Pro has a limit of 1.5TB cause of the Xeon CPU not because of the Ram Slots.
Now its of course not near the difference between ram and SSD but its a general law in Computer Electronic Engineering. The further the component is from the cpu the slower is the communication. But some Pipo doesn't seem to understand that here.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Go do your homework before you go around throwing names and insults at people.

 

[OnawaAfrica]

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Go do your homework before you go around throwing names and insults at people.

where did I insult someone? There is a Term for the time it take for communication between component. its called Latency. Please do your homework.

 

[sideshowuniqueuser]

where did I insult someone? There is a Term for the time it take for communication between component. its called Latency. Please do your homework.

Quoting you: "But some Pipo doesn't seem to understand that here."

I understand latency. There is a hell of a lot more to speed of RAM/SSD than distance between CPU and storage. This is ridiculous, I'm done with this convo.

 

[chucker23n1]

There is a hell of a lot more to speed of RAM/SSD than distance between CPU and storage.

Is there, though? The entire cache hierarchy is all about distance from the cores.

 

[OnawaAfrica]

Quoting you: "But some Pipo doesn't seem to understand that here."

I understand latency. There is a hell of a lot more to speed of RAM/SSD than distance between CPU and storage. This is ridiculous, I'm done with this convo.

saying that some Pipo don't seem to understand is not a insult.

of course a lot more goes into that than distance. but for the purpose of simplifying it I reduced it to one of the biggest factors.

plus please don't put Ram and SSD in the same Category.