The memory bandwidth on the new Macs is impressive. Benchmarks peg it at around 60GB\/sec\u2013about 3x faster than a 16\u201d MBP. Since the M1 CPU only has 16GB of RAM, it can replace the entire contents of RAM 4 times every second. Think about that\u2026<\/p>\n
Some say we\u2019re moving into a phase where we don\u2019t need as much RAM, simply because as SSDs get faster there is less of a bottleneck for swap. Indeed, SSDs have made significant strides, especially with the newest Samsung 980 NVMe drives pushing 5-7GB\/sec. This is closer to the memory bandwidth than we\u2019ve ever been with consumer-grade hardware, and you\u2019re only running about a third of the speed of main memory in a 16\u201d MBP. \u00a0However, with the huge jump in performance on the M1, the SSD is back to being an order of magnitude slower than main memory.<\/p>\n
So we\u2019re left with the question: will SSD performance increase faster than memory bandwidth? And at what point does the SSD to RAM speed ratio become irrelevant?<\/p>\n
Theoretically, SSD swap is \u201cfast enough\u201d if it can load data from a backgrounded app into main memory before the user notices a delay when clicking an icon in their Dock. Once this threshold is reached, there\u2019s not much of a distinction between an app being open or not.<\/p>\n
I do believe that a limited amount of RAM is becoming less of an issue as time goes on. As I\u2019m writing this, I\u2019m 5GB into swap on my 16\u201d MacBook Pro with 32GB of memory. In years past, a Mac 5GB into swap would have felt like it was crawling. However, today I haven\u2019t noticed a single hiccup, and honestly wouldn\u2019t even be aware of the swap usage if XRG wasn\u2019t sitting on my desktop telling me so.<\/p>\n
Would I buy a Mac with 16GB of RAM to use as a primary development machine today? No, probably not. While I don\u2019t typically notice a speed decrease due to swap usage, I don\u2019t think that storage threshold has been reached quite yet. However, I\u2019m looking forward to Apple\u2019s answer to the higher-end market and am confident they have M-series chips with more RAM in the pipeline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The memory bandwidth on the new Macs is impressive. Benchmarks peg it at around 60GB\/sec\u2013about 3x faster than a 16\u201d MBP. Since the M1 CPU only has 16GB of RAM, it can replace the entire contents of RAM 4 times every second. Think about that\u2026 Some say we\u2019re moving into a phase where we don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":534,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starcoder.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}