So I’m about to pull the trigger on a Base 14” after doing my due diligence I’m hit with the reality that many people aren’t considering. The base 16GB of RAM is shared with the GPU. That’s not cool. I had no choice but to go 32GB
just wanted to share in case anyone is going with Base configs.
Just in case you weren’t aware (because this is not how it has always worked for iGPUs, especially on PC): It really is X GB of RAM that all the parts of the SOC have access to. The GPU and CPU memory don’t partition/duplicate - ie if the CPU wants to share memory with the GPU or NPU or other X hardware block it doesn’t copy it over to X’s partition in the RAM. So there are no partitions effectively lowering the space any one unit has access to and if properly programmed, none of your programs should be wasting time/space duplicating memory. Now any one block isn’t allowed to take up all the space if they all are working on different data sets, so there’s a limit. It’s just much, much better than what you might be thinking it is judging by your post.
I mean there are also lots of other good reasons to go for more RAM than the base. People have been outlining their use cases in this thread. This particular reason of shared RAM is just less impactful than you might think.