That article is only looking at if the CPU is fast enough to keep up with an import. Basically a toy benchmark. You're going to be butting up against the memory limit in no time once you start actually editing.
That's nice. But what does CPU/GPU horse power have to do with memory?
If I want to spin up a bunch of VMs to do pre-commit test builds in clean environments, and each need RAM for the OS and user land, being able to edit a lot of raw video does nothing for me. I'm generally fine running macOS (or Linux), but sometimes I need to boot up Windows in a VM for specialized apps: how do I assign >16GB of memory to it if I only have 8-16GB of RAM? Even with fast storage I'm enamoured that I may need swap.
> how do I assign >16GB of memory to it if I only have 8-16GB of RAM?
This is Apple's slowest/ lowest performance M series CPU.
Complaining that the CPU they built for the MacBook Air and the lowest end MacBook Pro doesn't have 32GB of RAM misses the entire picture. This is Apple's first and lowest end M series chip, and it's blowing away Intel chips with discrete GPUs and more RAM. Their higher end processors which will be coming out over the next couple years are likely to be much better... and will support 32GB of RAM. In fact since Apple is migrating the entire line-up, it's likely the next generation of CPUs will support discrete RAM so the Mac Pro can offer systems with massive amounts of RAM as the current Mac Pro does.
> I need to boot up Windows in a VM for specialized apps
Aside from getting ARM Windows running on the Mac hypervisor, Windows VMs seem pretty unlikely. Another possibility is someone porting or creating an x86 emulator to run on the hypervisor.
Aside from that, Crossover by Code Weavers or something like AWS Workspaces are your best bets.
> In fact since Apple is migrating the entire line-up, it's likely the next generation of CPUs will support discrete RAM
I've been wondering about how much of the general purpose performance boost of M1 is due to having the RAM in the same package. That has to have benefits in power and latency. So if a future Mx chip supports discrete RAM, it may not seem quite as magical anymore. Then again, Apple's volume and margin is high enough that they could just build a single package with lots of RAM. You wouldn't be able to tinker with it, but it's not like Apple cares about that.
Makes you wonder if AMD or Intel will come up with a similar package for x86-based laptops.
As far as I understand about chip design (not much), the fact that the memory is inside the same package allows Apple to do stuff that would never fly with unknown external memory.
They know the exact latencies and can distribute the memory between CPU and GPU as they please.
A loss in upgradeability is a huge gain in speed and reliability.
My bet is that the next M processor will just have more of everything. More cores and more built-in memory. Maybe the one for the (i)Mac Pro will have upgradeable memory on top of the built-in ones. All of the laptops will only have the on-package memory.
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.
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.
