Question about Unified Ram and M1's....

[AdamNC]

The way that Apple has set up the ram and swapping and such is it comparable to Intels Optane systems? My old HP had Optane 32gig and a 512 drive on one NMVE board, then separate 16 gig physical ram. I never used more 8 gigs of ram but the amount of Optane usage was 100% full all the time and my SSD had off the charts read and write. 18T both. Just curious if they are doing something similar.

 

[xraydoc]

No.

Apple's unified memory system allows the various parts of the CPU (including the general processor cores, the neural processing unit, etc.) and the GPU to all share the same RAM and cache, so the system doesn't have to spend time copying data from one part to another.

Intel Optane, I believe, is a small ultrafast RAM disk that stored commonly used code so it could be moved in and out of the processor and system RAM faster than it could be off the SSD. A very different system than Apple's unified memory.

 

[AdamNC]

Cool thanks.... I was just wondering.

 

[casperes1996]

No.

Apple's unified memory system allows the various parts of the CPU (including the general processor cores, the neural processing unit, etc.) and the GPU to all share the same RAM and cache, so the system doesn't have to spend time copying data from one part to another.

Intel Optane, I believe, is a small ultrafast RAM disk that stored commonly used code so it could be moved in and out of the processor and system RAM faster than it could be off the SSD. A very different system than Apple's unified memory.

Correct on Apple Silicon, not entirely on Optane. Optane is more akin to a Fusion drive in the aforementioned setup by the OP. It would likely be used for swap, but would interact more with storage than memory and optane is ”just” a regular SSD in principle, just a very fast one; Not like RAM. Optane is persistent - overall bandwidth is about the same as a good SSD, but random read write and latency is better. But think of it as just storage, really