02-04-2021, 08:49 PM
jdc wrote:
We are all stuck in our old perceptions of how ram works... and its works waaaay differently on M1s
No. It doesn't.
The RAM is on the "chip" with the CPU/GPU, so accessing it is a little faster.
Memory is "pooled" between the CPU and GPU, which is not unlike the way it used to be allocated on old Macs that did not have dedicated GPU-memory.
Apple tweaked the management of the memory in the shared pool. It can reallocate memory between the CPU and GPU on the fly (with a modest, but sometimes detectable delay) so that if the GPU needs more memory, it just grabs it. This is new. It may actually slow down the Mac under some circumstances because a GPU-intensive activity can force CPU operations to use the boot-disk for virtual memory.
So, more memory is potentially waaay better.