Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Development

Re:Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Develop... by mikepurvis on Monday December 14, 2020 @12:31PM (#25420326)

I wonder if the Mac Pro version of this will do a two-tiered thing, with 16GB on the chip, and then a bunch of slots for your slower, "external" memory modules— basically the Mac Fusion Drive of RAM, with an internal controller to manage moving stuff in and out of the low-latency area.

I could certainly also see them going all-in on the integrated architecture, but the possibilities are intriguing if they want a reasonable story for a workstation that goes up to 100s of GB (the current Mac Pro's top configuration is an eye-watering 1.5TB of RAM).

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Re:Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Develop... by chungus_khan on Monday December 14, 2020 @03:20PM (#25422712)

There's not really any reason it would be slower. Being on-package doesn't offer any real performance advantage (the lengths of the traces to memory have a negligible impact on performance or latency), and is more of a benefit to manufacturing.

The memory on the M1 actually has fairly poor latency compared to most x86 systems:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

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Re:Apple M1 vs. Ryzen 3900X vs. Intel I9 in Software Develop... by rsynnott on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @08:38AM (#25430153)

The on-package RAM is probably more aimed at reducing power consumption; it's not particularly low-latency. This obviously wouldn't be an issue for an MBP.

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