When you first look at the M1 Mac with Apple Silicon, you might say to yourself, if the 16GB of RAM is shared/pooled with the GPU and there is no swapping, then it’s like you have 32GB of RAM or RAM + VRAM. Which is not really true like some have said, but…
In some cases let’s take the 32GB RAM M1 Pro. You say well 32GB is like 64GB but it’s not right
, it’s essentially (low balling) only 4GB for system and “some app” to “take advantage” of the remaning 28GB for GPU you theoretically get 28 + 28 + 4 = 60GB.
And that’s where I left off for a while, until I did the REAL MATH, you wanna hear the REAL MATH?
Go the other way:
Photo by Nana Dua on Unsplash
Let’s say you had a PC with 32GB of RAM GPU (workstation class), right? K, in order to LOAD UP that 32GB of VRAM on the GPU, you still have to have, in the Windows world 32GB + 4GBs or well really 48GB? Or 64GBs? + 32GB (hmm), but let’s say for sake of argument, you just went with, 32GB CPU + 32GB GPU, and only used 28GB of the CPU and 4GBs for your App that takes advantage of the 32GBs, and left 4GBs free on the GPU. How much RAM do you have? 64GB of 32 CPU (RAM) + 32 GPU (VRAM).
At this point you could actually say that 32GBs of Apple Silicon RAM is equivalent to 32GB CPU + 32GB GPU for a total 64GBs of RAM + VRAM.
BUT and here is the BIG BUT…
Let’s get to the swapping or lack there of.
On a PC if you’re swapping 24GBs you have to swap/load that into the GPU and that takes some time. But if it’s a Data Structure or complicated Data Set and you alter some of it via the CPU RAM, then on the next RENDER or whatever, sometimes you have to SWAP that whole 24GB chunk back in AGAIN to the GPU, (unless some kind of DMA, direct memory access) of the GPU RAM)!!
On the Mac with Apple Silicon if you edit the Data Structure or complicated Data Set it’s “just edited” and right there, don’t need FLUSH the GPU and reload all those voxels and textures etc, back into the GPU…
INSANITY…
So check this, out, as an aside…
If we get a QUAD Mac Pro Apple Silicon with 4 x M1 Max chips, with 64 GB of RAM, that would essentially be 250GB of VRAM!! Do you know what you can do with that? Do you know what you can do with that? And the fact that your app automatically inherits DMA? Because it’s shared/pooled memory? OMG
That’s like 512GBs of RAM+VRAM (or a GPU with 250GB of VRAM)
Silly NVIDIA card 32GB of RAM
Currently, there are NVIDIA Workstation Class GPUs with 32GBs of RAM, that cost $10,000!
That quad Mac Pro, could have 250GBs of VRAM and a true 128 GPU cores!!!
INSANE? Or like IDK what’s after INSANE?
In some cases let’s take the 32GB RAM M1 Pro. You say well 32GB is like 64GB but it’s not right
, it’s essentially (low balling) only 4GB for system and “some app” to “take advantage” of the remaning 28GB for GPU you theoretically get 28 + 28 + 4 = 60GB.And that’s where I left off for a while, until I did the REAL MATH, you wanna hear the REAL MATH?
Go the other way:
Photo by Nana Dua on Unsplash
Let’s say you had a PC with 32GB of RAM GPU (workstation class), right? K, in order to LOAD UP that 32GB of VRAM on the GPU, you still have to have, in the Windows world 32GB + 4GBs or well really 48GB? Or 64GBs? + 32GB (hmm), but let’s say for sake of argument, you just went with, 32GB CPU + 32GB GPU, and only used 28GB of the CPU and 4GBs for your App that takes advantage of the 32GBs, and left 4GBs free on the GPU. How much RAM do you have? 64GB of 32 CPU (RAM) + 32 GPU (VRAM).
At this point you could actually say that 32GBs of Apple Silicon RAM is equivalent to 32GB CPU + 32GB GPU for a total 64GBs of RAM + VRAM.
BUT and here is the BIG BUT…
Let’s get to the swapping or lack there of.
On a PC if you’re swapping 24GBs you have to swap/load that into the GPU and that takes some time. But if it’s a Data Structure or complicated Data Set and you alter some of it via the CPU RAM, then on the next RENDER or whatever, sometimes you have to SWAP that whole 24GB chunk back in AGAIN to the GPU, (unless some kind of DMA, direct memory access) of the GPU RAM)!!
On the Mac with Apple Silicon if you edit the Data Structure or complicated Data Set it’s “just edited” and right there, don’t need FLUSH the GPU and reload all those voxels and textures etc, back into the GPU…
INSANITY…
So check this, out, as an aside…
If we get a QUAD Mac Pro Apple Silicon with 4 x M1 Max chips, with 64 GB of RAM, that would essentially be 250GB of VRAM!! Do you know what you can do with that? Do you know what you can do with that? And the fact that your app automatically inherits DMA? Because it’s shared/pooled memory? OMG
That’s like 512GBs of RAM+VRAM (or a GPU with 250GB of VRAM)
Silly NVIDIA card 32GB of RAM
Currently, there are NVIDIA Workstation Class GPUs with 32GBs of RAM, that cost $10,000!
That quad Mac Pro, could have 250GBs of VRAM and a true 128 GPU cores!!!
INSANE? Or like IDK what’s after INSANE?
