801–810 of 942 posts
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It's not the end product itself that eats huge amounts of RAM or CPU. It's the dev tooling.
We must be using very different websites.
It's still not comparable with your average developer tooling in terms of footprint, was my point.
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I don’t understand how a demographic as technically intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that matters. Consider the fact that iOS devices ship with half the RAM of Android devices and feel as responsive, have better battery life, and have better performance. The Apple stack is better optimized to take advantage of the hardware they have. Indeed, o…
> I don’t understand how a demographic as technically intelligent as HN could make the flawed assumption that GBs of RAM in isolation of the entire system is all that matters I didn't claim it was all that matters, and I haven't seen anyone else do that either. I do take the point of the rest of your comment though, and it may well be the case that Apple does some clever stuff. But realistically there is only so far…
Except the M1 is a novel UMA architecture where the GPU & CPU share RAM. There's all sorts of architectural improvements you get out of that where you can void memory transfers wholesale. There's no "texture upload" phase & reading back data from the GPU is just as fast as sending data to the GPU. Wouldn't surprise me if they leveraged that heavily to get improvements across the SW stack. The CPU cache architecture also plays a big role in the actual performance of your RAM. Although admittedly maybe the M1 doesn't have any special sauce here that I've seen, just responding to your claim that "DDR4 is DDR4" (relatedly, DDR4 comes in different speeds SKUs).
> Your average Apple user is likely not a developer though (as others are very often pointing out on HN, whenever they make non-dev-friendly hardware choices). Furthermore, I would think such telemetry would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you have a pitiful 8GB of RAM, you're not going to punish yourself by trying to run workloads you know it wouldn't support.
No one is going to model things as "well users aren't using that much yet". You're going to look at RAM usage growth in the past 12 years & blend that with known industry movements to get a prediction of where you'll need to target. It's also important to remember that RAM isn't free (not looking at the $). I don't know if it matters as much for laptop use-cases as much but for mobile phones you 100% care about having as little RAM as you can get away with on your system since it dominates your idle power. For laptop/iMac use-cases I would imagine they're more concerned with heat dissipation since this RAM is part of the CPU package. RAM size does matter for the iPad's battery life & I bet the limited number of configs has to do with making sure they only have to build a limited set of M1 SKUs that they can shove into almost all devices to really crank down the per-unit costs of these "accessory" product lines (accessory in the sense of their volumes are a fraction of what even AirPods ships).
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This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great chip and all. But when you make it the only choice, people are finding the only choice is more than sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a boon for logistics.
The success of the M1 is a boon for Apple, but I'm not sure that only having to produce one CPU to be used across all devices is where the optimization lies, especially considering that Apple is selling the iPhone SE with an older CPU and not simplifying by not selling it.
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You're certainly correct for, say, highly-controlled benchmarks but don't discount subjective user experience. I've heard _far_ more M1 users talk about the subjective feel compared to even the previous generation MacBook hardware whereas it's been a long time since I've heard that about an Intel to Intel upgrade (basically since the Core -> Core Duo period) other than people with GPU-heavy needs and that seems like…
I do wonder how much of that is just getting a nice new laptop? If the average user was handed the equivalent laptop with an Intel CPU but told it was an M1 would they notice? Would they also think it was nice and fast?
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The m1 is built specifically to sip power and run cool. You don't think apple could come up with an arm processor that can keep up or exceed desktop x86 when those constraints are removed?
I'm not an expert, but isn't power efficiency the selling point of ARM? As in it runs efficiently, but there are diminishing returns to running it faster?
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I don't disagree that 8GiB for $1700 machine is absurd, however, I feel compelled to point out that MacOS is significantly more aggressive with memory compression than other operating systems and they come with blazingly fast SSDs, allowing devices to get away with less available memory.
A blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.
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10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.
How far does this goalpost go?
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I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though. Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers. The unfortunate part i…
How many eyes do you have?
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I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though. Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.
Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers. The unfortunate part i…
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I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.
Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)
I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.