M1 Owners: Is 16GB the same as Intel or has it better memory management?

[casperes1996]

One thing I will add

compared to previous intel machines - memory pressure seems much less noticeable in M series chips. I've had my M1 Pro well into the orange and didn't even notice - I forgot I'd left a second 4GB VM running alongside a 6 GB VM on a 16 GB machine with a whole suite of other productivity apps open.

If I hadn't seen the orange memory pressure graph I never would have known.

An Intel MacBook Pro would have been screaming its fan and chugging at that point.

So, while RAM is RAM - in my experience the M series chips handle high memory usage scenarios MUCH more gracefully.

Every single day at work, on a 16GB RAM MacBook Pro with M1 Pro:

• Xcode
• 3 iOS Simulators
• Android Studio
• 2 Android Emulators
• Safari with Jira, YouTube, and other sites that are less consistently the same
• Figma
• Mail
• Apple Music
• Teams
• Zed
• VSCode
• iTerm 2 often running various grade build tasks
• Messenger, Discord and a couple other smaller apps

Always orange to red memory graph, never notice outside of compiles being a little slower than if I had nothing running, but nothing from a user experience perspective is slowed to a noticeable degrees and fans are generally minimum running speed

 

[throAU]

I am amazed at how many programs I can run at once on my M2 Macbook Air with 16GB ram

On an Intel machine, it would choke

There is something in the sauce that gives one more bang for the buck when it comes to RAM

I suspect it is effective memory compression (and plenty of spare CPU power to do it), high speed SSDs, high bandwidth (and no need to use memory bandwidth to copy to/from GPU memory) among other things.

I'm not going to go so far as to say 8 GB on M series is like 16 on intel or anything like that. But performance under load in general is just so much better.

 

[throAU]

Every single day at work, on a 16GB RAM MacBook Pro with M1 Pro:

• Xcode
• 3 iOS Simulators
• Android Studio
• 2 Android Emulators
• Safari with Jira, YouTube, and other sites that are less consistently the same
• Figma
• Mail
• Apple Music
• Teams
• Zed
• VSCode
• iTerm 2 often running various grade build tasks
• Messenger, Discord and a couple other smaller apps

Always orange to red memory graph, never notice outside of compiles being a little slower than if I had nothing running, but nothing from a user experience perspective is slowed to a noticeable degrees and fans are generally minimum running speed

Yeah my regular workload is

• Safari with multiple windows/tabs
• ARC with multiple windows/tabs
• Firefox with a few tabs (yes, I run 3 browsers for different things)
• Mail
• reminders
• network radar
• networkview
• reeder
• a 6 GB windows 11 VM (inside runs Outlook, some windows tools (SCCM, SCVMM), etc. that thing is consuming pretty much all its RAM).
• messages
• calendar
• itunes
• jump desktop (multiple sessions)
• kypass
• 1password
• music
• notes
• notion
• teams
• shellfish
• zoom
• a couple of terminal windows

plus misc other small apps.

It doesn't break a sweat, to the point that I forget I have stuff running in other virtual desktops, etc.