this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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RAM is RAM. If you're able to manage it better, that's nice, but programs will still use whatever RAM they were designed to use. If you need to store 5 GiB of something in memory, what happens with the other 2.5 GiB, if they claim that it's 2x as "efficient?"
RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max's ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
Most of the things that "use" ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.
RAM transfer rate is is not important when swapping as the bottleneck will be storage transfer rate when reading and writing to swap.
Which I doubt Apple can make as fast as DDR4 bandwidth.