mschir

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mschir
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  • Apple insists 8GB unified memory equals 16GB regular RAM

    mschirmschir
    Well, it may or may not be true that their use of memory is far more efficient (I’m inclined to believe there’s something to it), and that, because memory can be allocated more fluidly instead of having hard limits for each purpose / component, the amount of memory available for a certain task may in fact be more at any given moment than on a traditional architecture (which is what they’re saying just too simply) - there is no getting around the fact that, if you’re doing something, like, working locally with an in-memory data set, no amount of fancy allocation is going to get around the fact that at some point you’re gonna have ten gallons of sh*t and a five gallon bucket. Yes, yes, compression, fast swapping what’s in memory for something else stored on disk, etc can help, but there is a limit. 

    To me the bigger issue is - how much do you need to do locally versus in a cloud environment? Training an LLM? May wanna use cloud compute / GPU’s / storage anyway. Working with 8k video files? Well that’s more about storage and compute, I guess…. 

    But still, it seems disingenuous of apple esp given the premium it’s charging for more memory, esp in a world where memory has gotten relatively cheap and modern apps have become memory hogs because there wasn’t much incentive not to be…. Hopefully this is changing but I digress. 

    All that to say - it’s a more nuanced conversation but I couldn’t stomach getting a machine with only 8 c16, or even 24gb these days especially since every mbp I’ve ever had has been spec’s out and lasted 5-7 years. I ordered one with 96gb accordingly. 
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