I just went from a 32GB RAM Macbook Pro to an 8GB RAM M1 Macbook Air...the difference is insane, I don't know what the hell the MB Pro is doing with its RAM, but it just felt like RAM was never enough on Intel Macbooks. Here on the M1, I don't feel my system crawling to a halt like I did on the MB Pro, and I'm doing the same workloads.
At this point, I don't think that's entirely clear. Something to do with the way Apple has tightly integrated the SoC parts and the OS's memory management lets them get massively more performance out of much lower-specced machines, and at least from what I've seen, no one has yet managed to truly unravel all that makes this possible.
I'm interested in this because I have a maxed 2018 intel mac mini and loaded it to 64gb of RAM. I want to ditch my eGPU and go to Apple Silicon on the next release.
I wonder if the memory performance should be so surprising. Because haven't people been bemoaning the "low" amount of ram in iPhone / iPad?
iPhone had 4GB on XS, and 11. And only went to 6GB on the Pro models. Yet the performance and benchmarking on these devices has seemed to garner praise with each successive generation.
I've just made a similar switch I went from a Pro (2018 i9 Pro with 32GiB of RAM) to an M1 Air with 16GiB of RAM and its ridiculous.
I've tried to look up what this difference might be, but all I've found is a hand-wavey answer about it being an SOC. If someone can ELI5 then I'd be super appreciative.
My feeling is that as everything is on chip, things are physically closer - less lanes on the motherboard - so latency from tasks is lessened. I would not have guessed it would be such a difference though.
