1y ago

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

www.macrumors.com 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

Following the unveiling of new MacBook Pro models last week, Apple surprised some with the introduction of a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip,...

8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple::Following the unveiling of new MacBook Pro models last week, Apple surprised some with the introduction of a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip,...

199 comments

I think they simply mean analogous in price.
- What, no! 8 GB Apple RAM costs 4 times that of 16 GB regular DDR4 RAM module.
  Edit: 5 times.
- The interviewee seems to be meaning it as memory usage (quote from them): "Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture.
  Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently."
  
  I mean, i played with memory compression on linux too, but it's not a factor x2 and you trade that with more CPU utilization/less battery life. And even though software is not worse in efficiency on this side, webbrowsers, VMs and games still need the RAM.
  
  If anything the memory being unified between the GPU and CPU makes it even less than 8GB equivalent
  
  They were making a joke about it being expensive
  
  because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory,
  Do they use below 24 megs of RAM in console? Or below 500 megs in GUI? Well, 500 megs is upper bound, I should probably compare to something less bloated than KDE.
  and we have a unified memory architecture.
  Really? They still doing UMA?

My dick is 2 inches long. That’s analogous to 10 inches on Mars.
- Enough with this Martian slander

Holy crap, apple charges $200 to add 8GB of RAM. I just bought 32GB of DDR5 for the Framework I have on order for $95.
- And now look at the actual chip prices and you'll know, why apple is so fucking rich
- They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it's a status symbol.
  Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
  
  The infamous Apple Water...
  
  That might be true but it’s also embarrassing for all pc brands who get slaughtered by apples performance as soon as they actually attempt to make things. For example there isn’t a single laptop in the windows world that can match anything apple does
- Won't someone please consider that Apple has to spend all the extra effort soldering the ram to the motherboard?? Only $200 extra is a steal!
- They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it's a status symbol.
  Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
- They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it's a status symbol.
  Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
- They have so much prestige and influence under their name that their super fans would buy anything from them at 1000% markup all because it's a status symbol.
  Hell, they could sell bottles of piss and the super fans would gladly sell off all their sperm/eggs and all unnecessary organs just to get a drop of it because sTaTuS SyMbOl.
- DDR5 runs at 52GB/s. Apple uses RAM that runs at up to 800GB/s (if you have enough, gets faster the more you have since it runs in parallel... but it's never as slow as DDR5).
  
  Huge doubt here. Apple RAM is LPDDR5. That's Low Power DDR5.
  Citing this site:
  LPDDR5 runs up to 6400 Mbps with many low-power and RAS features including a novel clocking architecture for easier timing closure. DDR5 DRAMs with a data-rate up to 6400 Mbps support higher density including a dual-channel DIMM topology for higher channel efficiency and performance.
  I'm looking at the Apple M2 Wikipedia page and it has the 800GB/s number you have, but that's gotta be something like RAM speed times number of RAM unit blocks for overall bandwidth.
  Apple RAM is not magically 15 times faster than DDR5.
  
  Faster isn’t everything. Less, faster ram is only applicable to a few application, where more, slower ram is going to benefit everything.
  It’s definitely comparable because that’s what it’s competing against. 16gb of Ram is 16gb of Ram, no matter how fast it is. Pricing it at 2-3x the cost for any other equivalent isn’t competitive at all.
  
  You're comparing single channel performance to entire system performance.
  That statement simply means the most highest of the high end Mac has 16 memory channels (admittedly more than EPYCs 12, but EPYC is in the ballpark). The mere mortal entry M2 has two channels, just like almost every desktop/laptop grade x86 CPU. They are not getting 800 out of only 8Gb of modules.
  
  I'm really interested in this kinda thing, do you have sources I can read?
  What I found was DDR5 runs at a max of 64 GB/s, and the M2 Pro runs at 400 GB/s. ~~I can't find anything about it being faster due to running in parallel.~~ Edit:I found it, looks like the M2 Ultra runs at 800 GB/s, cool. If I'm reading correctly, this was done by connecting two M2 Pros
  Also, the PS5 allegedly has over 400GB/s bandwidth just for perspective
  
  Sorry you got down voted so hard. Your comment spawned a lot of discussion which is a good thing.

RAM is RAM. If you're able to manage it better, that's nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it's 2x as "efficient?"
- Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.
  
  Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.
  
  Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something
  
  Did you know that you could do RAM compression on "old" MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.
- RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max's ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
  Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
  Most of the things that "use" ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.
  
  RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.
  Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.
  
  Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster.
  What a bullshit I see.

More apple gaslighting.
- Since 1990.
  I remember their CPU cycles were "worth more".
  They also always cheapens out on stuff, even when they used "PC" hardware, CPU from 4 years ago etc and RAM & HDD/SSD were so small you basicallyhad to buy a "next tier" machine (much more expensive).
  
  I remember their CPU cycles were "worth more".
  But this exists... There's still differences amongst PC CPUs in per-cycle performance...
  
  It is not theirs, it is IBM's. Or rather Freescale's, now bought out by NXP. Was true at the time.

Lol no. My poor linux kernel barely keeps everything stable in 8GB and even then by shoving stuff into swapon zram.
I can just barely run a game and have a ton of FF tabs open + an IDE + discord + multiple desktops
WIndows basically dies once you hit the swap, and it usually starts at like 2GB used.
I'm assuming MacOS lies between Linux and Windows in memory management and performance, so it'll definitely start lagging if you open too much.
And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can't call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG. In that case you advertise the MPG. And in Apple's case, it would be something like "X% less RAM usage per system process" which we all know doesn't actually exist because its snake ass Apple.
- And this is all ignoring the fact that this is a scam statement that should be struck down by the FTC. You can't call an 8 gallon gas tank equivalent to a 16 gallon gas tank even if your car has better MPG.
  lol good luck when Tesla literally charges $12k for “full self driving” software that does not do what’s advertised nor do what was promised over the last 10 years the CEO has been selling it. FTC and other orgs are toothless when it comes to false advertising, they’ll do nothing.
- What helps these machines are built-in SSDs that operate at about 2 GB/s. If swapping out 2 GB of background tabs you're not looking at when you switch to your IDE takes a second, you're not really going to notice it. Only if you're actually trying to operate with all the memory at the same time (big Kubernetes test suites or something) is when the swapping becomes noticeable.

So are they going to make the software smaller? What about iOS? Physically how does 8GB = 16GB? Can't wait to see Photoshop open a RAW and run out of memory. I will say the M2 CPU was pretty slick and if I got one cheap I'd throw Linux on there.
- This ^
  Architecture changes can happen as much as they want, but there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory, and between that and poor developer optimization I doubt these improvements will be seen by the end user.
  The CPUs really are great. It’s hard to want any other laptop when the performance/battery life are so great on the M series
  
  I find it pretty easy to want other laptops because I don't use Apple stuff because I dislike their UX. I know I'm weird but if I never have to get close to OSX or iOS I'm pretty happy.
  
  there’s certain tasks that require a fixed amount of memory
  Sure... and for editing a 12 megapixel photo that number is 384MB (raw or jpeg is irrelevant by the way - it's the megapixels that matter).
  As you add layers, you need more memory... but to run into issues at 8GB you'd need a lot of layers. And nobody is saying 8GB is enough for everyone, Apple does sell laptops with 128GB of RAM. They wouldn't do that if nobody needed it.
  And photoshop, which has it's origins in the late 1980's, is actually pretty lean. Back in those days it was common to only have one megabyte of RAM and Adobe has kept a lot of the memory management gymnastics they needed to fit within that limit. If you run out of memory it will make smart decisions about what to keep in RAM vs move to swap.

I call BS. My 8gb Mac Mini is terrible and constantly running out of memory.
I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify. A minimum of 32gb, preferred 64gb (photographer working with very large files) costs hundreds extra and can’t be done by myself anymore. It’s also hard to find these ones used as the people who buy them have a specific use case and don’t replace them often.
- Same here with my M1 MBA. Simply opening a browser with a bunch of tabs + a couple of productivity apps eats up your RAM.
  
  Thanks for sharing. I was eyeing the M2 MBA for my wife because I'm pretty satisfied with my work M1 MBP (32GB RAM), but it seems even apple silicon won't really do much with just 8GB RAM anyway.
- I’m in need of a new laptop, but the lack of upgradeable RAM in these has really made it hard to justify.
  Framework. Framework or desktop computer.
  
  Framework doesn’t fit the usecase, and I’m not running Linux or windows on a laptop
  I need a laptop with specifically huge battery life, a mainstream OS and Adobe compatibility.
  Edit: You really shouldn’t be downvoted for suggesting Framework. For anyone who wants a decently powerful windows or Linux laptop, it’s a great product, it just unfortunately doesn’t fit the use case that I have in mind for a laptop.
- Is it an M3?
  
  M1, but same idea. One app can take 8gb of RAM easy on it. No matter the improvements to the architecture, they’re not going to be able to solve for poor implementation on the dev side

Just waiting for Apple to just start trademarking and "inventing" units...
Our new Mac has the highest amount of "Rapid Storage Blocks (TM)" of any Mac ever! Enough to run 30 "Safari Experiences (TM)".
- Check out their "SSD":s, hard drives with SSD cache memory.
  Not a bad idea (if made correctly and not creating two failur points) but it was so ridiculously small, both of them, like 32GB SSD for 1TB DD when 1TB SSD was for like 200€...
  
  They haven’t sold FusionDrives in years.

My 0.7l wine bottle can fit in 3l of water

Absolutely hilarious. But I've heard MacBoys parrot this exact same line of propaganda for years now.
16GB are totally enough! Apple will manage my 20GB of required RAM in such a way that it'll fit in my 16GB (actually ~15)
- I have not. As someone in the Mac community I can tell you that Apple enthusiasts are Apple’s harshest critics. They are the type of people who care a lot about details like this, and have been criticizing Apple for years on the amount of RAM in entry level systems, as well as the absolute rip-off prices they charge for RAM upgrades.
  
  If they are rip-off prices and bad RAM, then why continue buying them? Doesn't that imply getting ripped off?
  When I argued that for the money you shell out for a mac, you could get a machine with 1.5-2x the specs, the constant thing I heard was "yeah, but you can't compare a SoC with a normal laptop/PC". Then came the argument about RAM not mattering, CPU speed not mattering, and so on. It would be cheaper for companies to give devs linux machines than macs, but they don't want to hear it because macs are now the table tennis tables, pool tables, arcade machines, avocado toast, and "we're a family" of companies.
  
  the mac community
  holy fuck i hate consumerism why don't you just kick me in the nuts instead of burning my eyes out like this

Yes, which is why anyone spending anywhere close to this on a laptop gets 32 GB RAM

MacOS is pretty decent at memory management. That being said, 8GB of RAM is ridiculous in 2023. Newer and updated applications are tossing memory management out the window. Platforms like Electron wreck memory usage, and many apps popular desktop apps are using Electron now. 12GB is the new 8GB, for Macs. 32GB is the new 16GB for PC's. I wouldn't recommend a computer with less than 12GB of RAM for more than $300.

You can't play games so you won't be able to notice the difference.
- Tell that to my Ableton Live copy and all the plugins.
  
  Ok this is completely valid. Those plugins suck the jooce.
- Softwares and large files need ram too
- But apple says Mac will get AAA games

Thanks to RAM Doubler and DoubleSpace you won't feel the difference.
Edit: I had forgotten that it was first called Stacker before MS copied/reverse engineered it and sold it as DoubleSpace.
- Downloadmoreram.com is going to get a lot more traffic

"lol" said Apple "lmao"

Not if it’s sharing memory with the GPU. Then its 6Gb is analogous to what exactly?
- You see, it grows inverted exponentially. 6 GB equals about 22 GB. Your best option will be the 2 GB model which performs like 64 GB. If that still doesn't fit your needs you could always download additional RAM.

I call Bullshit

Ha! Of course we will see this as a reduction in price, right?... Tim Apple?... Are you there?...

and they wanted to bring games to mac??, like how?
- Instant ram tar compression. What else?
  
  Don't all systems compress RAM these days? It's an obvious win.
- A good first step would be: don't make your own proprietary graphics API (Metal) and support Khronos standards (OpenGL, Vulkan) instead.
  
  basicly what everyone is doing except apple
- I mean, I’ve been playing about 100 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 on my M1 MacBook Pro, on the ultra preset. It runs just fine, and the machine barely gets hot while being nearly quiet. In fact, it is a very pleasant gaming experience!
  Could the game run better on a dedicated gaming PC? Sure! Does it need to? Nah, not for me. The fact that I can play on the couch while my SO watches something else is worth a lot more than some extra FPS, to me.

*half the ram, double the price! *That sounds catchy...

I bought a 8gig and I’m usually running apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. I really feel the hit.
Work bought me 16gig M1 and it is noticeably faster when swapping around between apps.
Fuck 8gigs

Fucking apple with the dumb ass marketing again. Can't wait to explain to fanbois you can't shove 16 lbs of shit into an 8 lbs bag...
- You see with apple the whole product is made of shit. That's 60 percent more shit per shit

Fucking lol

I've been on 16GB of ram on all of my machines for so long ... It's really the sweet spot for everything I do (gaming etc. ) I don't do media production or anything like that. All that said I'm currently in the market for a new machine and will probably get 32GB "just to be safe" but since my next laptop will probably be a framework I don't have to make the decision till I actually need the ram and even then I can still decide to get one stick first the other later and the prices scales pretty linearly.
8GB might still be enough for some web browsing and stuff but apple should not put this little RAM in anything they call professional.
And before anyone says "you only need that much ram in Windows" well ... I don't and won't be running Windows ;)
- Linux Or templeos?
  
  What? Linux.

I don't even think I've ever even seen my work MacBook using under 8GB of RAM and I'm fairly RAM efficient in my workflow. You'd start Docker on that thing and half your RAM is gone already, add VSCode and Chrome and everything is trashing already.
For the average user? Yeah, compression and swap is probably good enough. For professional use? Hell no.

Been there, done that ....
https://tidbits.com/2019/01/24/25-years-ago-in-tidbits-ram-doubler-debuts/
- Great times. Tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat with stacker
  
  I've done that too, but not on a Mac....

I don't disagree that the M processors need less RAM, but the idea that they need half as much is bullshit. My poor little 8GB M1 struggles with more than 20 chrome tabs open, and it especially struggles when running apps that aren't built to be M1 compatible (through Rosetta).
- They share ram with gpu, which means they need more of it for equivalent memory space, not less. There’s no magic that makes less memory work like more other than swap, and swap is slow as fuck, even with a high speed ssd (which the m3’s actually have slower ones).
  
  It's an entirely different architecture, so every program needs less RAM (with exceptions like I mentioned above). That's why they're using shared RAM; because they can pull it off (mostly).

I had to use an m1 base air for school. The CPU was fast but ram was always at Ower 90 percent while doing almost nothing
- ram is meant to be used so high ram usage is not really any indicator of efficiency. if ram is slow and application is being swapped in and out frequently then it will be laggy but high ram usage can also be an indicator of a snappier experience.

On my unix-based system, after boot I'm sitting at 2gb usage, while Windows would be at >6GB, so it's not that far fetched. Until you try to run any applications..
- Windows only takes a lot of RAM if it's available. Try it out with less RAM and it's more around 2 GB I think.
  For any computer I use 32 GB seems to be the optimum nowadays.
  
  Exactly so. Windows eats what it can and leave $X free.
- I'm sitting at 300 mb usage after boot running Linux and at 250 mb usage on a secondary machine running OpenBSD.
  
  Are you using a desktop environment?

Maybe it’s true, but a better headline would be “our systems come with 16gb as standard, which feels like 32gb on windows.”
So you get a good amount of ram, which feels better because It’s a Mac.
- “our systems come with 16gb as standard, which feels like 32gb on windows.”
  while performing a task that can be done with 8gb easily
  
  8gb is overkill, 3gb works just fine

CrApple are just such hardcore money grabbers since pretty much forever.

Apple is banking on some big companies ordering computers based on "Pro" moniker and that's the reason why 13" Macbook Pro existed at all. Now that it is gone, 14" base M3 is taking its place. It's likely to be running basic Excel and PowerPoint so that's okay for the end user but still mighty shitty of Apple to price gouge on RAM.

God damn fucking marketers

Memory compression does allow the os to store to cram more data in the RAM, but does 8gb RAM with memory compression really equivalent to 16gb of RAM?
- Windows compresses RAM too. It's really a combination of fast flash memory (Apple doesn't use SSDs, they put flash memory on the same package as the CPU) and being smart about moving things to flash memory if they don't benefit from being in RAM.

Ok.. but PCs can also use zram.

Ah yes, the megabyte myth. Certainly haven't anything like that before...

Just a wild guess, I think they mean that the M3 chip can load and unload things so much faster that it doesn’t need as much ram to do regular tasks. Of course, if you are loading video renders into ram, it won’t really apply to it anymore.
- what the chip arquitecture has with I/O operations?💀
  
  M3 is a SoC, or System on a Chip. The whole M3 is all the things. I/O, CPU, GPU, Bus, RAM and even storage. Everything is on a single custom ARM chip.

just not

RAM manufacturers - haha

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