Likely as some applications are designed to use Swap/Page files irrespective of physical memory.
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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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Q-6
I ran Windows with no page and no swap for many years without any problems. My current system has 2.4 GB of paged pool because I have not disabled the page and swap files, mainly from not needing to bother. I would hope that the operating system just works around not having a page or swap file. That is, if an application wanted to use those directly, then the operating system would do it synthetically with memory.
Should do just depends on the SW I know some apps do need a page file. I've ran Windows similarly in the past with no Page file, however now with far faster HW and far better memory management I leave both macOS & Windows to deal with it.
I've seen at times of extended work the notebooks utilising the full 32GB of RAM, equally infrequent nor really impacting performance. So a Swap and or Page file is always preferential IMO, more so on systems with less memory. I currently have three Mac's with 8GB RAM; 12" rMB, 13" Intel MBP & 13" M1 MBP they all look to be comparable in Swap file usage.
The 13" Intel MBP was used heavily for work propose for a good two and a half to three years, I never concerned myself with the Swap or SSD usage the M1 looks to be the same so far. My plan is to utilise the M1 MBP on engineering projects in Papua New Guinea, however COVID continues to aggravate & complicate...
Q-6
My Windows desktops have 48 GB and 128 GB of RAM respectively. The most RAM I've used was in playing with a bunch of Virtual Machines at the same time. Normal production use is 30 GB of RAM as I'm not currently running any Virtual Machines though I expect to in a few weeks and moreso in the fall. I have 1 TB and 2 TB NVMe SSDs on the motherboard but I don't think that page or swap is going to impact either of them anytime soon. In retrospect, I should have gone with 2x2 TB. I have a 2 TB SATA 3 and the system has room for another five.
This is a very smooth running system.
I took a look at some specs that were leaked on Alder Lake and was rather disappointed. I looked at the 12700 and 12900 and they would provide a significant boost in power to my desktop but the PL1/PL2 is 125/200+ Watts. I was looking for something with 65 watts. Maybe things get a lot better with refinements but it looks like I will have to wait until at least the 13th gen Intel CPUs for a possible replacement.
I'll get a MB that holds 256 GB of RAM as well. No plans to use it but always best to be flexible. Kind of crazy when your desktop has the same amount of RAM as base model Macs in storage.
I'm talking about basic use. The m1, in all its forms, should handle basic use without artificially inducing significant hardware degradation.
As of now, it still doesn't.
Got to be a notebook for me as travel is (was, who knows now) a big factor. I flipped a lot to Windows as the 2016 MBP redesign was a mess and only went on to prove to be an unreliable mess. I'm indifferent about the TouchBar and still strongly dislike the lack of quantity and diversity of ports (M1 MBP 2, Intel MBP 6+MagSafe), equally having such computational performance and battery longevity in a 13" with a now reliable chassis tipped the balance in the favour of the M1 MBP.
Storage I'm fine with 256 for the 13"MBP for the 16" MBP 1TB, mostly I don't care as either ways I need use external drives. Frankly it's easier when dealing with multiple portable systems.
As my HW works towards paying the bills, I've become conservative towards SW and what vendors promise. I always look to keep the SW image as clean & simple as is practicable. Clients are very far from interested in "your" IT issues, rightly so. I've dug into the M1 MBP, experimented with it to see what macOS on Apple Silicon can do, reset it back to stock and set up for my needs as a base 13" MBP. It's been fine no issues, I don't restart unless Apple requires (OS update). Looked at the memory usage & SSD via Activity Monitor & Terminal, nothing shocking, certainly nothing to trigger me to install additional SW to troubleshoot something I don't see, nor indicated.
For those having issues you should look at this guide here on MR, I would just add that running Onyx may resolve any inconsistencies in the OS (read the help to avoid tears as Onyx is powerful tool) or just reinstall the OS directly from Apple. The M1 13" MBP is extremely capable, yet as said its not replacement for a 17" portable workstation...
Q-6
My 2020 M1 MacBook is faster than a 2020 Intel MacBook, but how much of the performance gain is because of the Apple silicon CPU running native code, and how much is because the SSD and RAM are on the same SOC?
Could Apple have made an M1 with their silicon CPU, and a discrete, replaceable SSD, and it would've been some ~unnoticeable amount slower because now there's a bus in between the CPU and the SSD?
Would anyone really care about swapping if we could easily replace the SSDs .. for me it's only a concern because if my SSD dies then this whole $1000 laptop goes into the recycling bin.
Could Apple have made an M1 with their silicon CPU, and a discrete, replaceable SSD, and it would've been some ~unnoticeable amount slower because now there's a bus in between the CPU and the SSD?
Would anyone really care about swapping if we could easily replace the SSDs .. for me it's only a concern because if my SSD dies then this whole $1000 laptop goes into the recycling bin.
pshufd wrote:
"You can turn off page and swap in Windows and macOS. I'm not sure about Linux. That would likely solve the writes problem but it could cause running programs to crash."
That's EXACTLY what I've been recommending that someone in this forum try. Been suggesting it for MONTHS now.
No one has tried it and given a report.
I've run my Intel Macs this way for YEARS now, without any problems at all.
My 2012 had 10gb of RAM and ran just fine with VM disk swapping disabled.
As does the 2018 Mini I'm typing this on, with 16gb of RAM.
Here's a screenshot from a few seconds ago:
"You can turn off page and swap in Windows and macOS. I'm not sure about Linux. That would likely solve the writes problem but it could cause running programs to crash."
That's EXACTLY what I've been recommending that someone in this forum try. Been suggesting it for MONTHS now.
No one has tried it and given a report.
I've run my Intel Macs this way for YEARS now, without any problems at all.
My 2012 had 10gb of RAM and ran just fine with VM disk swapping disabled.
As does the 2018 Mini I'm typing this on, with 16gb of RAM.
Here's a screenshot from a few seconds ago:
Again, I have zero problems with SSD writes. Again, I am very happy with the M1 power. Again, I agree that "the problem" is only affecting a (very) small number of users.
But I don't agree that Apple is completely off the hook here. There could still be a bug in macOS that affect a very small number of users in certain use cases. My 27" iMac was turning off itself randomly. Apple fixed it, it was an electrical problem caused by a shortcut in the metal enclosure affecting... a (very) small number of users.
In any case I strongly recommend anyone to go for the M1 machines. They are dynamite. If the dynamite does not blow with your software or use case, then you can return the machine after a week or so. But the chance is (very) high that the dynamite will properly and beautifully explode.
Don't know but I provided a link to the video in the paragraph before the one you quoted:
A fully blinged out M1 mini runs US$1,799.00 and you can cut out $400 of that out by getting a far cheaper external 2TB SSD. No PC matches that, none. Heck, real world tests (not benchmarks) have shown that kind of M1 kickef the pants off of home built PC in $5000 range. And this is assuming something doesn't go horrible wrong with your efforts to built the PC.
Regarding the video Basically watch as $10,000 goes bye bye when the same thing could have been down M1 MacBook Pro which was (and is) £2,598.99 with a 2 TB SSD, 16GB unified RAM and Final Cut Pro. If the poor guy already had a monitor and keyboard then a M1 MacMini with a 2 TB SSD, 16GB unified RAM for £1,998.99 . Tying that into the old PC would have been saner (and cheaper) then what that poor sod went through.
He says, at the 20:24 mark that was £7540 or over $10,000 which means ~£7.540 = ~$10.00. As for the Mac prices I pulled them from https://www.apple.com/uk/ and those includes the VAT.
Ryzen 5950X $799.99 (Microcenter)
ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming ATX Motherboard 2.5 GBPS LAN $330 (Amazon)
2xCorsair Vengeance LPX 64 GB (2x 32 GB) DDR4 3200 $700 (Amazon)
2xCrucial P5 2TB 3D NAND NVMe Internal SSD, up to 3,400 MB/s $618 (Amazon)
2xCrucial BX500 TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD $390 (Amazon)
MSI Gaming X Trio GeForce RTX 3070 Ti OC Graphics Card 8 GB GDRR6X $1,309.99 (Amazon)
Cougar Panzer Max Ultimate Full Tower Gaming Case $160 (Amazon)
Corsair HX850 850 Watt Platinum Certified PSU $199 (Amazon)
ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO Tower CPU Cooler $45 (Amazon)
That's a total of about $4,500.
Geekbench 5 Single Core/Multicore/OpenCL
Above System: 1,736 / 17,162 / 135,886
M1 Mac mini: 1,711 / 7,415 / 18,260
And you get 128 GB RAM and 8 TB SSD so you can run large in-memory workloads with huge data files. You can also run large Windows and Linux Virtual Machines in case your professional environment requires those operating systems.
But you can get a system that beats the M1 in performance for a lot less. Let me put together a configuration.
Intel i7-10700K $399.99 (Amazon)
Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Elite AX MB $219.99 (Amazon)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB DDR3 3200 $159.99 (Amazon)
Corsair RM750x 750 Watt Gold PSU $109.99 (Amazon)
Crucial p5 2TB 3D NAND NVMe SSD $309.00 (Amazon)
Cougar Panzer Max Ultimate Full Tower Gaming Case $160 (Amazon)
ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO Tower CPU Cooler $45 (Amazon)
ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB GPU $279.00 (Amazon)
~$1,683.
Ryzen 5 version:
AMD Ryzen 5600X $289.93 (Amazon)
MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK Gaming Motherboard $159.99 (Amazon)
~$1,513
Geekbench 5 Single Core/Multicore/OpenCL/Cost
Ryzen 5950x System: 1,736 / 17,162 / 135,886 / $4,500
i7-11700 System: 1,715 / 9,893 / 22,516 / $1,683
M1 Mac mini: 1,711 / 7,415 / 18,260 / $1,799
Ryzen 5600X System: 1,620 / 8,187 / 22,516 / $1,513
One thing that you'll notice is that the M1 Mac mini has the lowest multicore score of all of these systems. You can get single-core scores in the 1,800s with the i9-11900 if you need higher single-core performance than what is listed here.
The x86 systems also give you a lot of expansion options like HDDs, additional SSDs, additional GPUs, and additional RAM, up to 128 GB.
This is even with over-inflated GPU, RAM and SSD prices. GPU prices are starting to come back down but are still elevated. I paid $170 for the GT 1050 Ti last fall before prices took off. At least they aren't double MSRP anymore for this model.
Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Elite AX MB $219.99 (Amazon)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB DDR3 3200 $159.99 (Amazon)
Corsair RM750x 750 Watt Gold PSU $109.99 (Amazon)
Crucial p5 2TB 3D NAND NVMe SSD $309.00 (Amazon)
Cougar Panzer Max Ultimate Full Tower Gaming Case $160 (Amazon)
ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO Tower CPU Cooler $45 (Amazon)
ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB GPU $279.00 (Amazon)
~$1,683.
Ryzen 5 version:
AMD Ryzen 5600X $289.93 (Amazon)
MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK Gaming Motherboard $159.99 (Amazon)
~$1,513
Geekbench 5 Single Core/Multicore/OpenCL/Cost
Ryzen 5950x System: 1,736 / 17,162 / 135,886 / $4,500
i7-11700 System: 1,715 / 9,893 / 22,516 / $1,683
M1 Mac mini: 1,711 / 7,415 / 18,260 / $1,799
Ryzen 5600X System: 1,620 / 8,187 / 22,516 / $1,513
One thing that you'll notice is that the M1 Mac mini has the lowest multicore score of all of these systems. You can get single-core scores in the 1,800s with the i9-11900 if you need higher single-core performance than what is listed here.
The x86 systems also give you a lot of expansion options like HDDs, additional SSDs, additional GPUs, and additional RAM, up to 128 GB.
This is even with over-inflated GPU, RAM and SSD prices. GPU prices are starting to come back down but are still elevated. I paid $170 for the GT 1050 Ti last fall before prices took off. At least they aren't double MSRP anymore for this model.
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How much is written to disk in an average hour for you all?
I'm doing some mild web browsing, three or four tabs open in Safari, nothing else running, RAM usage is around 60-70%.. and my M1 MacBook is writing about 300MB to disk per hour (as seen in the Disk tab of Activity Monitor).
Why would it even write one byte to disk, I would've thought that it could all be done in RAM. Is there logging going on that I can disable? thanks,
I'm doing some mild web browsing, three or four tabs open in Safari, nothing else running, RAM usage is around 60-70%.. and my M1 MacBook is writing about 300MB to disk per hour (as seen in the Disk tab of Activity Monitor).
Why would it even write one byte to disk, I would've thought that it could all be done in RAM. Is there logging going on that I can disable? thanks,
A lot of web objects get cached to disk so that they don't have to be loaded from the network every time you visit a page.
You can open up activity monitor and look at the counts of writes to see what the top processes for writes are.
If it wrote that much for 24 hours every day for a year that would be 3 TBW. Nothing to worry about.
Remember he was doing this near the turn of the year and needed fast delivery. As he pointed in the video thanks to covid and the way things were in England he wound up paying premium in many cases. And lets not forget the time putting this machine together. More over he gives the prices as they were at that time throughout the video
As I said if something goes horribly wrong (and boy in his case did it ever) than a PC isn't cheaper especially if you count the downtime, building, and testing as to find out what went wrong.
"Metal is supported by the same AMD cards that OpenCL performs best on and in most cases, when both frameworks are supported, Metal is the best option" -2020 GPGPU Roundup: Metal vs. CUDA vs. OpenCL, AMD vs. Nvidia
Watch Why Apple's M1X Macs Don't Need 64GB of RAM! and understand just how much a game changer the way Apple is doing memory is. Also the price quoted for the M1 was brand new; PC builders have buckets of used parts (some of unknown quality) to work with.
A Refurbished Mac mini Apple M1 Chip with 8‑Core CPU and 8‑Core GPU blinged out to 16GB unified memory; 2TB SSD; Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports; Gigabit Ethernet port is $1,439.00.
If you are smart you will boot up off an external SSD rather than pay Apple's ridiculous premium on SSD and get a 16GB unified memory; 1TB SSD; Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports; Gigabit Ethernet port for $1099.00
And for the Cherry on top the M1 Macmini is doing this all on a 18W TDP plus whatever the monitor and drives may be producing. Heck, Apple has a fan able to cool a 65W TDP CPU in the M1 MacMini. What is the TDP wattage of your "cheap" PC?
Another gauntlet is the 30 W power draw from the wall a fully blinged out M1 MacMini at maximum load. How many watts at full load does the "cheap" PC pull?
When you consider all the factors: initial cost, time saved, RAM efficiency, and performance per watt the M1 MacMini pounds the crap out of any "cheap" PC which meets all of those requirements.
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You made a post that didn't indicate the time frame. Your post is not reality today.
You could have simply ordered a system from Dell at that time. They had systems with Ryzen 5900X and 5950X and high-end GPUs and I recall that they were less than $5,000. I was looking at these because it was so difficult to get parts back then and the parts offered were from scalpers and it's possible to get scammed.
Even Apple did not change their prices - you could get an i7-10900 iMac 27 with a strong GPU for well under $5,000 back then as is the case right now.
I've been working on electronics since the 1960s starting out with vacuum tubes. I built a big system last fall because I missed doing custom builds. These days teenagers do them. I imagine even younger kids do builds with their parents or older siblings. Builds are a lot easier today because there are so few parts. It's been challenging getting parts due to the pandemic though not impossible. People do custom builds to learn, to build with better parts than are available from OEMs and to just have fun. You pick up a lot of useful skills doing builds including the ability to repair or upgrade systems which a lot of people in your network may appreciate.
I've used systems with 1.4 TB of RAM at my former job. Sometimes your professional workflow just needs a lot of RAM. One example would be a bank running a Postgres server.
I use OpenCL so that I can include nVidia and AMD cards for comparison.
My CPU typically runs at 30 Watts and 28-32 degrees. Interestingly my M1 mini runs about the same temperatures.
My two production programs run poorly on Apple Silicon. I tested one of them and it takes 150% more time on Apple Silicon compared to x86. I have not timed my other main production program but I suspect that it is worse. There are use cases where the M1 does not perform well. I do not expect this to change in the next year. I also run 3x4K displays and 1 additional QHD display. My Windows desktop can run this configuration with ease. The M1, not so much. I had considered getting two Mac minis but then found that my applications run poorly on Apple Silicon.
M1 has its uses but it's still a low-end system
M1 is useless in many configurations. My son's workplace will be getting him an Intel 16 MacBook Pro because he has to run x86 Windows and Linux virtual machines. Many of the programs and development environments that he uses aren't certified for Apple Silicon either. He works in oncogenomics.
I don't think anyone here would argue against this statement.
But the rest of your post is combination of wishful thinking and misconceptions. If you want a fast desktop PC and are constrained neither by space nor the OS, you definitely have much better options than the M1 mini. They won't be cheaper, but they will give you much better performance and more customizability.
I used systems with these specs in my former job. M1 would have a tough time competing. Use the appropriate tool for the job.
I provided a link to the video. I thought that people would, you know, actually watch the bloody thing.
Why? I just responded to your text. Watching a video takes a lot of time.
Watched it and he makes the same mistakes as a lot of people here do. He makes the mistake of thinking more RAM is only useful for performance. He leaves out the problem of when you need more than 32 GB of RAM for an actual working set. There are many tasks that require gobs of RAM and an Apple Silicon device will not make up the difference. If you need the RAM then swap isn't going to make up the difference.
The Why Apple's M1X Macs Don't Need 64GB of RAM! video kind of puts the kabosh on the "require gobs of RAM" thing that is the "mistake" in the something goes horribly wrong with efforts to built a PC video
As explained beginning at the 4:39 mark the unified memory is right there next to the CPU. On Intel machine it isi a ways away from the CPU and thanks to the lower bandwidth (2 channel vs the M1's 8 channel memory) a lot more has to be stored in the RAM to do the same thing ie the way Intel CPUs handle RAM is inefficient.
This is why Intel CPUs "require gobs of RAM" "for an actual working set" - they have to hold things in memory because there isn't enough of a bandwidth between the CPU and the RAM and the distance that bandwidth has to travel.
I have to ask. Why do so many PC users have the idea that the solution to performance is largely solved by throwing more RAM at is rather than things like faster hard drives and the like? The idea has be coming from somewhere.