# Any reason to assume that M1 Pro/Max Macs will need less RAM than M1 (or Intel) Macs?



## Vik (Oct 20, 2021)

This has been discussed earlier, but back then M1 vs. Intel was the topic. Based on all the differences between M1 and M1 Pro/Max, I'm slightly more optimistic about being able to get more out of 32 or 6g gb RAM on these Macs than one could from earlier Macs. Anyone?


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## rnb_2 (Oct 20, 2021)

It's possible that the combination of very high-speed PCIe 4.0 NVMe internal drives and the memory bandwidth of the M1 Pro/Max might make streaming everything direct from disk more feasible than it was in the past, but I think that there is going to have be some optimization on the software side to really take advantage of it, and that will take some time.


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## KEM (Oct 20, 2021)

From what I understand the M1 chips already have memory built into them, and the optimization for M1 is very good since developers will only have to program for one chip on one operating system, I’m not super tech savvy but from the numbers I’ve seen it does look like M1 Macs won’t need as much RAM as their Intel/AMD counterparts


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## rnb_2 (Oct 20, 2021)

KEM said:


> From what I understand the M1 chips already have memory built into them, and the optimization for M1 is very good since developers will only have to program for one chip on one operating system, I’m not super tech savvy but from the numbers I’ve seen it does look like M1 Macs won’t need as much RAM as their Intel/AMD counterparts


Sort of - the RAM is on the same physical package as the CPU/GPU/etc, but is not actually part of the chip. They're basically reducing the distance that information has to travel between the RAM and processors, while also making the entire pool of RAM available to everything, thus reducing the constant copying of data from system RAM to video RAM.

While it would be fairly straightforward to optimize for M1 if you use Apple's tools, cross-platform developers (like most of the companies we talk about on VI-C) like to maintain as much common code as possible, and that can make the optimization process more complicated and time-consuming.


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## cedricm (Oct 20, 2021)

Vik said:


> This has been discussed earlier, but back then M1 vs. Intel was the topic. Based on all the differences between M1 and M1 Pro/Max, I'm slightly more optimistic about being able to get more out of 32 or 6g gb RAM on these Macs than one could from earlier Macs. Anyone?


Quite the opposite if I understand things right: memory is unified, aka shared between the processor and the graphics card.
So before, lets say you had 32 gb of ram and perhaps a graphics card with its own 6 gb of ram.
Now you have 32 gb of ram - n gb of ram for video.


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## rnb_2 (Oct 20, 2021)

cedricm said:


> Quite the opposite if I understand things right: memory is unified, aka shared between the processor and the graphics card.
> So before, lets say you had 32 gb of ram and perhaps a graphics card with its own 6 gb of ram.
> Now you have 32 gb of ram - n gb of ram for video.


This is true, but probably not too important in an audio context, since the VRAM probably isn't being used for much beyond the basics of being a frame buffer for the display. In 3D/Photo/Video/Gaming, that VRAM is used to hold textures and any compute tasks that the GPU is working on, so in that context, you could see a sizable "deduction" from system RAM for VRAM use, though that would be counterbalanced by the ability to access a lot more VRAM in a 32/64GB M1 system than you would have on most dedicated GPUs.


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## cedricm (Oct 20, 2021)

Well, it depends. 
Many musicians use 2, 3, 4, perhaps even more external screens, the gpu mem usage could end up being not insignificant. 
Anyways, they sure look like great laptops, but I'd wait to get the feedback of other musicians.


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## Technostica (Oct 20, 2021)

cedricm said:


> Well, it depends.
> Many musicians use 2, 3, 4, perhaps even more external screens, the gpu mem usage could end up being not insignificant.


Running a 2D desktop consumes little memory, so even running multiple screens isn't a big deal.


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## gsilbers (Oct 20, 2021)

Vik said:


> This has been discussed earlier, but back then M1 vs. Intel was the topic. Based on all the differences between M1 and M1 Pro/Max, I'm slightly more optimistic about being able to get more out of 32 or 6g gb RAM on these Macs than one could from earlier Macs. Anyone?



I had a similar question. From what i gather on the m1 macbook air is that you still need the amount of ram needed to load all those kontakt instruments. Maybe with prebuffer lowered you can load more, but 32gb of ram is still 32 gb of ram. Later once playing i think it might be faster/easier to stream more instruments at once but i did get some issue when trying to load close to 16gb of ram.


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## handz (Oct 20, 2021)

It will definitely need some update on the software side of things.


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## samphony (Oct 20, 2021)

I hope due to the architecture that 64gb ram on the m1max is more comparable to 128gb on an intel system. We’ll see.


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## Vik (Oct 24, 2021)

I hope so too, and I can actually get a M1 Mac with 32gb for 20% off if I order it _today_ – this could be a very useful computer if 32gb on an M1 Max is comparable to 64gb on an Intel iMac.


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## danwool (Oct 24, 2021)

I've heard it floated that the integrated RAM on M1 Macs could be thought of as roughly twice that on Intel Macs (so 64gb on an an M1 will act more like 128gb on an Intel). BUT, it's not clear to me whether that estimate, rough as it is, applies only to the integrated storage, or if those of us with libraries spread out on multiple external drives can also apply that metric - The 8TB storage option on the new MBPs seemed totally insane, until I considered this.


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## Dewdman42 (Oct 24, 2021)

That is a dubious claim IMHO


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## danwool (Oct 24, 2021)

The doubled-RAM claim? Agreed. But the point about whether the integrated-RAM stats that we're seeing apply to use with external storage is my main question here.


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## Technostica (Oct 24, 2021)

danwool said:


> The doubled-RAM claim? Agreed. But the point about whether the integrated-RAM stats that we're seeing apply to use with external storage is my main question here.


From what I understand, the RAM efficiency is more a matter of using ARM which is a RISC architecture. 
Maybe also to do with Apple's OS and development tools. 

The raw RAM and storage performance in the M1 weren't that exceptional, but the 'RAM affect' was still noted. 
So I'm not sure that the latest M1 versions will be a major leap with regard the 'RAM affect'. 

More bandwidth doesn't always lead to significant gains as it depends where the bottlenecks are.


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## Dewdman42 (Oct 24, 2021)

The main ram improvement in Apple silicon is that the gpu shares the same memory space as the cpu. So video frame buffers don’t have to be copied into the gpu dedicated memory for displaying everything you see. Skipping that skip saves a lot of time and resources and less waiting around for it to be completed.

There could be some other ways that m1 is avoiding moving data around due to this shared memory but that is the big one.


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## Technostica (Oct 24, 2021)

Dewdman42 said:


> The main ram improvement in Apple silicon is that the gpu shares the same memory space as the cpu. So video frame buffers don’t have to be copied into the gpu dedicated memory for displaying everything you see. Skipping that skip saves a lot of time and resources and less waiting around for it to be completed.
> 
> There could be some other ways that m1 is avoiding moving data around due to this shared memory but that is the big one.


That's only significant if you have large amounts of data that multiple engines in the SoC need to access.
For a 2D desktop, the data is not that much to start with so there's little to gain.
I think what is being discussed here, is that the ARM architecture is more efficient in how it handles memory.

There are multiple factors involved and the obvious biggest differences over a Windows laptop is the ARM ISA.
The unified memory model is very significant, but not so much for audio.


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## Dewdman42 (Oct 24, 2021)

I do not view anything else as being significant. Apple made a big deal out of gpu memory shared with the cpu and I think also that is significant. Any other aspects are very small gains


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## Technostica (Oct 24, 2021)

Dewdman42 said:


> I do not view anything else as being significant. Apple made a big deal out of gpu memory shared with the cpu and I think also that is significant. Any other aspects are very small gains


A 2D frame buffer is very small, so how is that being shared via unified memory going to lead to saving a significant amount of memory? 

There was an article linked here which talks about how using a RISC ISA such as ARM reduces the memory footprint and helps performance in other ways.


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## Benjamin Duk (Nov 8, 2021)

With the new M1 Pro/Max laptops being out now. Does anyone have any real world feedback on the Memory usage? Wondering if 32GB memory will be enough if I currently use a 64GB AMD PC machine currently.


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## gamma-ut (Nov 8, 2021)

Technostica said:


> There was an article linked here which talks about how using a RISC ISA such as ARM reduces the memory footprint and helps performance in other ways.


RISC was never about saving memory; CISC was - it's why CISC remained important in microcontrollers for decades until comparatively recently. Arm developed the Thumb instruction set as a response to the problem of executables getting bigger with 32bit fixed-length instructions compared to the variable-length instructions of CISC (and in effect, partially removed one of the claimed benefits of RISC, though it wasn't a big deal in practice) - it was the way they got Nokia to buy into it way back in the 90s. RISC conveyed the benefit of being more efficient to run in general because it allowed easier pipelining and scheduling and by virtue of being simpler, making it easier to design and optimise compilers.

As in media work data far outweighs instruction counts, any real-world savings in memory capacity are going to come from dynamic data compression and decompression on the basis that the instruction cycles to do that are cheaper in terms of energy than fetching gobs of data from the main memory. This is becoming common in machine-learning workloads because their performance is dominated by data bandwidth.


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