All of Apple’s M series chips have the ram right on the same package as the rest of the SoC. Not upgradeable, but also much faster than traditional off-package memory.
Funnily Apple marketed their slower ram as something better in the nineties when memory speed was king. Now when nobody cares about memory speed (I bet most people confound bandwith with speed, forgetting latence too) but we all like to have lots of it because we use lots of programs & apps, Apple is doing the reverse.
In this case I was referring to bandwidth and latency, which on-package memory helps with. It does make a difference in memory-intensive applications, but the majority of people would never notice a difference. Also Apple will absolutely give you a ton of memory, you just have to pay for it. They offer 128GB on the MacBook Pro, and it’s unified so the GPU has full access to it, which makes it surprisingly good for running LLMs locally, for example.
All of Apple’s M series chips have the ram right on the same package as the rest of the SoC. Not upgradeable, but also much faster than traditional off-package memory.
Funnily Apple marketed their slower ram as something better in the nineties when memory speed was king. Now when nobody cares about memory speed (I bet most people confound bandwith with speed, forgetting latence too) but we all like to have lots of it because we use lots of programs & apps, Apple is doing the reverse.
Lol.
In this case I was referring to bandwidth and latency, which on-package memory helps with. It does make a difference in memory-intensive applications, but the majority of people would never notice a difference. Also Apple will absolutely give you a ton of memory, you just have to pay for it. They offer 128GB on the MacBook Pro, and it’s unified so the GPU has full access to it, which makes it surprisingly good for running LLMs locally, for example.
Yeah, that’s the ticket though, upgrading from 8GB to 16GB won’t cost you the price of 8GB but way more.