8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

They'd call it the AppleZeus

Any laptop with a recent GPU will beat an Apple Laptop for performance. Some higher end CPUs too.

Apple has really good power efficiency, which is great when unpluged, but plugged in laptops with 200 to 300W TDPs are still better.

Hahahahaha

I have friends who spec for their clients every day (I only do it occasionally). Mac laptops cost anywhere from 50% to 100% more than equivalent Dell and Lenovo laptops (ignoring the even less-costly brands, because none of us spec those).

They all have access to the same hardware. And MacOS, despite the gaslighting in this article, isn't any more performant on the same hardware in the real world.

Circumstances outside gaming where any high end laptop isn’t good enough is pretty niche and I don’t think this really matters to most consumers. I would prefer to run Linux but at work, my options are Windows or MacOS. It’s a pretty easy choice. Apple products are great when someone else is paying for them.

This is mainly due to Windows being incompetent getting an ARM version of Windows in a usable state.

Snapdragon claims to have a M2 level ARM chip for desktop/laptop. It will likely be pretty comparable to the M2, but what OS will it run? Not Windows. In fact at the enterprise level, Lenovo is selling laptops with Android in desktop mode.

So, once that chip is released, I am guessing you will see great options with Linux and Android. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will surprise us with an update that lets Windows run reasonable well on ARM.

tl;dr

The memory bandwidth isn't magic, nor special, but generally meaningless. MT/s matter more, but Apple's non-magic is generally higher than the industry standard in compact form factors.

Long version:

How are such wrong numbers are so widely upvoted? The 6400Mbps is per pin.

Generally, DDR5 has a 64-bit data bus. The standard names also indicate the speeds per module: PC5-32000 transfers 32GB/s with 64-bits at 4000MT/s, and PC5-64000 transfers 64GB/s with 64-bits at 8000MT/s. With those speeds, it isn't hard for a DDR5 desktop or server to reach similar bandwidth.

Apple doubles the data bus from 64-bits to 128-bits (which is still nothing compared to something like an RTX 4090, with a 384-bit data bus). With that, Apple can get 102.4GB/s with just one module instead of the standard 51.2GB/s. The cited 800GB/s is with 8: most comparable hardware does not allow 8 memory modules.

Ironically, the memory bandwidth is pretty much irrelevant compared to the MT/s. To quote Dell defending their CAMM modules:

In a 12th-gen Intel laptop using two SO-DIMMs, for example, you can reach DDR5/4800 transfer speeds. But push it to a four-DIMM design, such as in a laptop with 128GB of RAM, and you have to ratchet it back to DDR5/4000 transfer speeds.

That contradiction makes it hard to balance speed, capacity, and upgradability. Even the upcoming Core Ultra 9 185H seems rated for 5600 MT/s-- after 2 years, we're almost getting PC laptops that have the memory speed of Macbooks. This wasn't Apple being magical, but just taking advantage of OEMs dropping the ball on how important memory can be to performance. The memory bandwidth is just the cherry on top.

The standard supports these speeds and faster. To be clear, these speeds and capacity don't do ANYTHING to support "8GB is analogous to..." statements. It won't take magic to beat, but the PC industry doesn't yet have much competition in the performance and form factors Apple is targeting. In the meantime, Apple is milking its customers: The M3s have the same MT/s and memory technology as two years ago. It's almost as if they looked at the next 6-12 months and went: "They still haven't caught up, so we don't need too much faster, yet-- but we can make a lot of money until while we wait."

Note those are comparing different numbers.

The number you quoted was for a single memory channel.

A processor has as many memory channels as it feels like. So that 800 number basically means about 16 channels. The M2 plain seems to be about two channels.

For comparison, x86 desktop CPUs have long been 2 channel designs. You go up the stack and you have things like EPYC having 12 channels.

So for single socket design, apple likely has a higher max memory performance than you can do single socket in x86 (but would likely turn in lower numbers than a dual socket x86 box).

The PS5 uses a unified 16gb of GDDR6, which has really high bandwidth for graphics applications. Apple is full of shit about their LPDDR5.