Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by ogre_codes on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:12AM (#25206981)

Apple makes it very clear in their materials that their unified memory is a very big part of their performance boost.

> So if a future Mx chip supports discrete RAM, it may not seem quite as magical anymore.

I agree, but I also doubt they will be making a Mac Pro SOC with huge amounts of RAM aboard either. I'm not sure how common they are, but Apple supports up to a terra-byte of RAM (maybe more). I could easily see SOCs with 64GB of RAM, but I'm struggling with them putting 128 or 256GB+ on the SoC.

Maybe some kind of hybrid?

Very curious to see how they are going to work around this.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by ema on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @06:40AM (#25208206)

Doing a hybrid approach which is basically swap to off-chip ram shouldn't be too hard.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery by ogre_codes on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @12:29PM (#25211739)

It would be interesting if Apple treated their off-chip RAM as a RAM disk. Could make for some intriguing possibilities. So you'd "swap" from the hot/ on chip RAM into slower GDDR RAM instead of to the SSD.

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