RAM Requirements With AS

[ght56]

My guess is that 8GB on AS is going to function very well in the real-world simply because Apple is not going to push a premiere device of this type that is functionally insufficient. These are the devices that are either going to make or break AS and they likely are going to try to use these to expand their market share (my guess is that iPhone users currently using Windows systems for personal or home business uses presents a prime area for expansion.) If 8GB would not work well, I don't think they would offer it even for these entry AS Macs.

I think it is also possible we might see wayyyyy faster SSDs.

 

[pshufd]

My guess is that 8GB on AS is going to function very well in the real-world simply because Apple is not going to push a premiere device of this type that is functionally insufficient. These are the devices that are either going to make or break AS and they likely are going to try to use these to expand their market share (my guess is that iPhone users currently using Windows systems for personal or home business uses presents a prime area for expansion.) If 8GB would not work well, I don't think they would offer it even for these entry AS Macs.

I think it is also possible we might see wayyyyy faster SSDs.

I'd like to do Firefox development and I'm pretty sure that 8 GB of RAM will be a considerable bottleneck. It would be a lot more productive to use a 16-core machine with 64 GB of RAM.

 

[ght56]

I'd like to do Firefox development and I'm pretty sure that 8 GB of RAM will be a considerable bottleneck. It would be a lot more productive to use a 16-core machine with 64 GB of RAM.

You and I are probably not the prime targets of these machines. Presumably (and hopefully) models to follow will target us.

 

[pshufd]

You and I are probably not the prime targets of these machines. Presumably (and hopefully) models to follow will target us.

Yeah, but don't they want developers to port, test, debug and develop?

Mozilla developers told me that they had a shortage of systems and I assume that they will be ordering this round but it would be really great if they systems could provide for efficient dev and test.

 

[ght56]

Yeah, but don't they want developers to port, test, debug and develop?

Mozilla developers told me that they had a shortage of systems and I assume that they will be ordering this round but it would be really great if they systems could provide for efficient dev and test.

Is it likely that most developers are in a situation where they need more RAM? (I don't do development work.) I figured the Mac Mini was platform that they updated almost specifically for developers.

 

[pshufd]

Is it likely that most developers are in a situation where they need more RAM? (I don't do development work.) I figured the Mac Mini was platform that they updated almost specifically for developers.

Mozilla has racks of Minis as they can build for Linux, macOS and Windows. In general, the more cores and RAM you have, the faster you can build as the build is highly parallel. The best platform for building Firefox is a Hackintosh with a Threadripper.

 

[leman]

Yeah, but don't they want developers to port, test, debug and develop?

Mozilla developers told me that they had a shortage of systems and I assume that they will be ordering this round but it would be really great if they systems could provide for efficient dev and test.

For developing and testing, a Mini with 16GB should be fine. Building can always be done on a dedicated build server.

 

[pshufd]

For developing and testing, a Mini with 16GB should be fine. Building can always be done on a dedicated build server.

Which is why I'm also considering a Threadripper Hack.

 

[leman]

Which is why I'm also considering a Threadripper Hack.

I am curious whether Apple will ever release M-variants that would outperform a Threadripper for these tasks. In theory, a 16-core Apple Silicon CPU should give a 32-core Threadripper a run for it's money... but the question is what is the maximal chip size that Apple wants to build.

 

[pshufd]

I am curious whether Apple will ever release M-variants that would outperform a Threadripper for these tasks. In theory, a 16-core Apple Silicon CPU should give a 32-core Threadripper a run for it's money... but the question is what is the maximal chip size that Apple wants to build.

Threadripper for Zen3 isn't out yet.

Apple would have to change the memory architecture if you wanted to put a lot of RAM in the system and have equal access from all MCMs.

 

[jazz1]

I have no technical expertise. But, eventually I'd like to see some kind of comparison between the RAM ratio of the M1 w/16GB, and a variance of RAM in the former Intel Macs that host more memory. This would be with an eye for performance and perhaps value.

I suppose there are a lot of other variances (both hardware and software) to consider. But I am still mystified about the 16GB limit. I truly hope that the 16GB limit is not a hidden early adopter penalty.

Recently someone suggested that the reason Apple was starting with the lower end Macs for AS was that they needed paying customers as a form of "beta testers" for the new hardware and software. Maybe this goes on all the time within and without the tech. industry?

Time will tell I suppose. Yes, I've ordered a AS Mac. So let us hope that, "Fortune favors the bold" 😁

 

[pshufd]

I have no technical expertise. But, eventually I'd like to see some kind of comparison between the RAM ratio of the M1 w/16GB, and a variance of RAM in the former Intel Macs that host more memory. This would be with an eye for performance and perhaps value.

I suppose there are a lot of other variances (both hardware and software) to consider. But I am still mystified about the 16GB limit. I truly hope that the 16GB limit is not a hidden early adopter penalty.

Recently someone suggested that the reason Apple was starting with the lower end Macs for AS was that they needed paying customers as a form of "beta testers" for the new hardware and software. Maybe this goes on all the time within and without the tech. industry?

Time will tell I suppose. Yes, I've ordered a AS Mac. So let us hope that, "Fortune favors the bold" 😁

Best Buy - first page of laptops - they range from 8 to 16 GB of RAM. So they are hitting the market sweetspot with 8-16 GB of RAM. We ARE NOT the target audience outside of using these as a casual device.

 

[leman]

I have no technical expertise. But, eventually I'd like to see some kind of comparison between the RAM ratio of the M1 w/16GB, and a variance of RAM in the former Intel Macs that host more memory. This would be with an eye for performance and perhaps value.

Can you explain what you mean by “variance” in this context? Also, the previous Intel Macs (with the exception of the Mac mini) didn’t host more RAM.

But I am still mystified about the 16GB limit. I truly hope that the 16GB limit is not a hidden early adopter penalty.

Not much to be mystified about. Apple is using new RAM packaging tech that allows better performance but requires more involved engineering. The 16GB maximum is a pragmatic choice to make the entire approach economically viable. They could have offered more RAM, but that would raise the cost of the platform in a disproportionate fashion. So for their first rollout they decided to target the popular (and very profitable) low-end, where these limitations wouldn’t be out of place.

In the meantime, the manufacturing process will mature and the next iteration of Apple silicon will contain more powerful parts with more RAM and more bandwidth, ready to power more expensive Macs.

 

[Joelist]

Remember a couple of things here that CAN affect RAM usage potentially:

1) Apple Silicon cores are FAR different than other ARM. They are WIDE (8 wide no less), have a ton of fast cache and a huge number of execution units among other things. This means it can send a lot more stuff to the CPU where it is not sitting in RAM and can also hold more in cache again not needing the RAM.

2) Apple Silicon has a bunch of coprocessor blocks that take load off the main GPU and CPU. Again this means things are not sitting in RAM as often or as long.

Long and short - the only way WE have to see how much RAM is actually needed is real world usage. Apple may know but we do not have that info.

 

[Krevnik]

Remember a couple of things here that CAN affect RAM usage potentially:

1) Apple Silicon cores are FAR different than other ARM. They are WIDE (8 wide no less), have a ton of fast cache and a huge number of execution units among other things. This means it can send a lot more stuff to the CPU where it is not sitting in RAM and can also hold more in cache again not needing the RAM.

2) Apple Silicon has a bunch of coprocessor blocks that take load off the main GPU and CPU. Again this means things are not sitting in RAM as often or as long.

Long and short - the only way WE have to see how much RAM is actually needed is real world usage. Apple may know but we do not have that info.

Neither of these impact RAM usage in the way you are thinking.

Caches hold copies of data. CPU caches hold copies of data in RAM. RAM caches hold copies of data on disk. CPU cache size has zero effect on RAM usage, and everything to do with not starving out that execution pipeline. Those coprocessor blocks use RAM caches (buffers) to hold the input and output of the work being done. Software manages those RAM buffers, writing to disk and loading fresh data. But this is how it’s been done for ages. Nothing here has changed, just because say, Apple’s HEVC encoder block is faster than Intel’s. If anything, it’s more likely these buffers would benefit from getting bigger, not smaller.

I completely expect RAM usage on the M1 to be similar to Intel. They still use the same concepts when it comes to memory management that have been in use for decades. x86-64 and AArch64 have similar memory alignment requirements for efficient load/stores. There’s not enough changing here to impact things. Not big enough to change someone’s decision on how much RAM to buy for their system at least.

I’ve worked on projects where we used the same code on iOS and macOS, and we never really saw a difference in memory usage between the two for the same code. At least not when comparing x86-64 and AArch64. The bigger differences were driven by the fact that iOS would warn apps about memory pressure and cause us to free internal buffers more aggressively. macOS just pushes stuff to the swap file under memory pressure instead.

 

[wyrdness]

What Krevnik said is correct. There's nothing about AS/ARM that's going to magically make it use less memory. I would also expect that running Intel applications with Rosetta would have an additional memory overhead. So until everything is ported to AS, you might even use more memory than before.

 

[Krevnik]

What Krevnik said is correct. There's nothing about AS/ARM that's going to magically make it use less memory. I would also expect that running Intel applications with Rosetta would have an additional memory overhead. So until everything is ported to AS, you might even use more memory than before.

Since Rosetta 2 is an "AoT" instead of "JIT" compiler, you aren't going to need any extra memory for compiler caches or anything like that, while the app is running. The price is that bigger app bundles will have really slow launch times when being recompiled. Like the 20 second number quoted for Microsoft Office apps.

So I'm not even sure Rosetta would have much of a memory impact?

 

[jtara]

I'd like to do Firefox development and I'm pretty sure that 8 GB of RAM will be a considerable bottleneck. It would be a lot more productive to use a 16-core machine with 64 GB of RAM.

What exactly is "Firefox Development"? Developing web apps? I don't think this would be very challenging. But depends on what you are doing. Are you transpiling from some goofy language to Javascript? Just code editing and inspect/debug isn't much of a workload.

I do hybrid-native development, it's a challenge for the hardware. I use a fairly large framework, and a build of a modest-size app takes maybe 5 minutes on a 2017 iMac Pro with 64GB and maybe 15 on my beat-up 2012 i7 Mini with 16GB. That's with a lot of Xcode building for iOS, and for Android the compiler is slower so double those times.

On the iMac Pro, I've never seen it to use the full 64GB for any of my workload, so never swaps. It would swap occasionally on a 32GB machine.

I certainly would not want an 8GB machine for anything though.

 

[David Hassholehoff]

I think "Firefox development" is, you know, developing Firefox...
As in "contributing code to the Mozilla Firefox project"

 

[jtara]

I think "Firefox development" is, you know, developing Firefox...
As in "contributing code to the Mozilla Firefox project"

In that case.... yea... not a suitable machine. I'd wait for at least 32GB RAM.

And the largest SSD storage available, since lots of object file churn that will wear the flash.

Unfortunately, it is a bad time to be a developer needing a new machine. Your choices are an inadequate model with an ARM processor (likely with lots of issues with tools not yet ported and either will be slow or not work at all), a new Intel-based machine that will depreciate more quickly than normal, or a used machine with jacked-up price due to demand.

 

[pshufd]

What exactly is "Firefox Development"? Developing web apps? I don't think this would be very challenging. But depends on what you are doing. Are you transpiling from some goofy language to Javascript? Just code editing and inspect/debug isn't much of a workload.

I do hybrid-native development, it's a challenge for the hardware. I use a fairly large framework, and a build of a modest-size app takes maybe 5 minutes on a 2017 iMac Pro with 64GB and maybe 15 on my beat-up 2012 i7 Mini with 16GB. That's with a lot of Xcode building for iOS, and for Android the compiler is slower so double those times.

On the iMac Pro, I've never seen it to use the full 64GB for any of my workload, so never swaps. It would swap occasionally on a 32GB machine.

I certainly would not want an 8GB machine for anything though.

Building Mozilla Firefox.

I've worked on Javascript, JPEG, PNG and a few other things in the past.

Here are the build directions for building Firefox on Windows: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/windows_build.html

There are similar directions for other platforms. I've worked on Thunderbird on x86, x64 and PowerPC in the past.

 

[jtara]

Building Mozilla Firefox.

I've worked on Javascript, JPEG, PNG and a few other things in the past.

Here are the build directions for building Firefox on Windows: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/windows_build.html

There are similar directions for other platforms. I've worked on Thunderbird on x86, x64 and PowerPC in the past.

Macs are IMO the best universal development platform. Your instinct to move to a Mac is good, it's just the timing is off IMO.

I wouldn't jump right now unless your current setup is quite old.

You could get a cheap Windows or Linux/BSD machine (e.g. any desktop or laptop with i7 or higher and enough RAM) for the interim. You can put a lot of memory in an Intel desktop for cheap.

Before I went to Mac, I always built my own from boards and cases. I have two rackmount cases with pretty old ASUS boards that are sitting there dead, used to run one Windows and one Linux.

BSD might be a better interim choice than Linux (and certainly Windows) if you do intend to jump to Mac. While Linux is close, MacOS is BSD under the hood. So, you would start to get used to the command-line tools, etc.

The Mac platform has great utility for software development. I use it for server-side development as well, pretty plain-jane Rails or Sinatra, PostgreSQL. I Think Different with IBM Cloud FWIW. AWS is the "safe choice" but it pains me that so many companies just make that decision on the basis of popularity!

 

[pshufd]

Macs are IMO the best universal development platform. Your instinct to move to a Mac is good, it's just the timing is off IMO.

I wouldn't jump right now unless your current setup is quite old.

You could get a cheap Windows or Linux/BSD machine (e.g. any desktop or laptop with i7 or higher and enough RAM) for the interim.

BSD might be a better interim choice than Linux (and certainly Windows) if you do intend to jump to Mac. While Linux is close, MacOS is BSD under the hood. So, you would start to get used to the command-line tools, etc.

Mozilla gave out Macs to developers back in 2007 or 2008. I was offered one. You have to support Windows, macOS and Linux and you can only run the three major platforms legally on a Mac. They used racks of Mac Minis for build and regression testing; kind of like the modern cloud.

They don't have a lot of development machines so I thought about jumping in to do testing, debugging and maybe fixing things. It would be a good chance to learn the AS architecture as well if it's public.

I just built a i7-10700 Windows system with a lot of memory and it would probably do a Windows build pretty quickly. But I'd like to play around with AS.

My current system:

Cougar Max case
550 Watt Corsair Gold PSU
i7-10700
64 GB RAM
ASUS TUF Gaming 490Z
1 GB NVMe
2 GB SATA3 SSD
Arctic eSports Duo Air Cooler
Several case fans
GTX 1050 ti
3x4k Dell 2718Q monitors

The system is designed to run cool and sip power. It's possible that the AS system would be faster for doing builds. That's what I'm curious about. I'd really prefer something more than the M1 though - as a lot of people here would.

 

[MK500]

Speaking from a lot of years of experience, there is something weird going with the M1 Macs.

They absolutely sip RAM.

All of the technical points about architecture and Rosetta listed in the posts above were also my perspective when I ordered my Air with 16GB. I was thinking that was a pretty low amount for me. My other machines all have 32 or 64GB.

My actual RAM usage on my M1 is really small. "memory pressure" is near the bottom all the time. To the point that I do not think the 8GB model would have been a problem at all.

You can find many posts throughout this forum and elsewhere pointing out this same phenomena. Maybe Apple learned some pretty impressive tricks from all those years of having to support bulky apps on iPads with 2 or 4GB RAM. Very little of their installed base of iPads has more than 4GB even today.

Also, where Intel Macs will start to bog down if you launch a bunch of apps, you can have a whole dock-full of apps and launch them immediately one after the other and each will take around 1 second to launch. There are 25 apps in my dock right now; and I just did this with all of them to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

It's pretty crazy. Maybe its the RAM on CPU package? Maybe it's the storage architecture (which effects memory paging)?

Whatever it is, it's basically magic.

 

[pshufd]

Speaking from a lot of years of experience, there is something weird going with the M1 Macs.

They absolutely sip RAM.

All of the technical points about architecture and Rosetta listed in the posts above were also my perspective when I ordered my Air with 16GB. I was thinking that was a pretty low amount for me. My other machines all have 32 or 64GB.

My actual RAM usage on my M1 is really small. "memory pressure" is near the bottom all the time. To the point that I do not think the 8GB model would have been a problem at all.

You can find many posts throughout this forum and elsewhere pointing out this same phenomena. Maybe Apple learned some pretty impressive tricks from all those years of having to support bulky apps on iPads with 2 or 4GB RAM. Very little of their installed base of iPads has more than 4GB even today.

Also, where Intel Macs will start to bog down if you launch a bunch of apps, you can have a whole dock-full of apps and launch them immediately one after the other and each will take around 1 second to launch. There are 25 apps in my dock right now; and I just did this with all of them to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

It's pretty crazy. Maybe its the RAM on CPU package? Maybe it's the storage architecture (which effects memory paging)?

Whatever it is, it's basically magic.

My suspicion is that they added some kind of architectural optimization to improve virtual memory processing. VM has been relatively static technology for quite some time.

Something you can try:

Write a C program that allocates a GB of RAM and then sleeps.

Open up 15 terminal windows and run the program in each window.

Look at the memory statistics to see if you're using 15 GB of VM.