Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by notriskfree on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:06AM (#25206950)

I doubt the M1 macs are really using memory much more efficiently; the stock M1 macs with 8GB were available rapidly; the Macs with 16GB ram or larger disk space had a three to four week delay when ordering; a lot of enthusiasts and influencers rushed out and got base models; they are then surprised to find they can work ok in most apps with only 8GB.

Perhaps they never really needed to fit 32GB into their intel macs either. Some days after the glowing reviews; and strange comments about magic memory utilization; we now see comments concerned about SSD wear due to swap file usage.

If the applications and data structures are more compact in memory on the arm processors; it should be easy to test; you just need an intel mac; and an M1 mac running the same app on the same document and look at how much memory it uses.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by joking on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:59AM (#25207247)

When you need 32 or 64gb of ram is not because the data structures or the programs you use need memory, it's because the data they use (database content, virtual machines, images, videos, music... ) fill that ram, and those data is not going to occupy less on an arm machine.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by Twisell on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @05:01AM (#25207587)

However real case usage of such massive amount of data are limited for typical desktop user. Massive database load usually happen on specialized servers in which 256Go RAM and more are pretty mundane.

So on customer PC ram is maybe more used as caching mechanisms or eaten away by poorly designed memory leak/garbage collection.

And if your GPU is able do to real time rendering on data heavy load maybe you need less caching of intermediate results as well.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by Maxion on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @05:54AM (#25207914)

Plenty of use cases for more than 8gb of ram. When you're doing data analysis on even smaller datasets you may need several times more available memory than the size of the dataset as you're processing it.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by Twisell on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @06:10AM (#25208018)

1.Again typical use case for entry level PC is not data analysis on bigdata.

2.My current production server is a PostgreSQL database on a 16GB RAM VM running on Debian (my boss is stingy). This doesn't prevent me from managing a 300GB+ data cluster with pretty decent performances and perform actual data analysis.

3.If Chrome sometimes use +8GB for a godsake webrowser the only explanation is poor design, there is no excuse.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by llampx on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @05:36PM (#25215052)

"Nobody needs more than 640k of RAM"

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by joking on Thursday November 26, 2020 @08:07AM (#25219704)

that was not my point, my point was that if you need it, you will need it regardless of the architecture.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by Joeri on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @12:51PM (#25211975)

I think you’re right. I’ve only ever needed 32 gb when I was running a local hadoop cluster for development. Those virtual images required the same amount of ram regardless of OS.

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