Upgraded to MBP m2 2023 - RAM question (MBP23 vs MBP 19)

[Jutah]

Hi all,
i just moved from a 2,3ghz i5 MBP 2019 to a M2 MBP PRO brand new.
Both equipped with 16gb of ram.

I use it for office activities, especialli Google suite (chat/meet and a lot of Chrome with many different windows open).

I wish i had upgraded to 32gb of ram but i got budget constraints.

I tested the ram usage under stress condition (100 tabs open in chrome with the site trackthis.link): it happens that the old mac seems to have a really better ram management than the new one.

The graph stay green all the time, while the new m2 go in the yellow zone.

How is it possible?

Thank you for any explanation you can share

m2

i5

 

[3166792]

Are you perhaps running a lot of your apps in Rosetta still?

In Activity Monitor -> CPU you can sort apps by Kind and see what's running as Intel.

Generally speaking, 16 GB of RAM on Apple Silicon should have more headroom than 16 GB of ram on Intel as it is more memory efficient.

 

[Jutah]

Are you perhaps running a lot of your apps in Rosetta still?

In Activity Monitor -> CPU you can sort apps by Kind and see what's running as Intel.

Generally speaking, 16 GB of RAM on Apple Silicon should have more headroom than 16 GB of ram on Intel as it is more memory efficient.

Hi, thanks for the answer.
No, the only apps running as "intel" is whatsapp.

Generally speaking, 16 GB of RAM on Apple Silicon should have more headroom than 16 GB of ram on Intel as it is more memory efficient.

yes, exactly, that's what I've read before purchase so I'm little surprised about that consumption difference.
If I check the "CPU" usage within the same stress test (100 opening tabs) the winner - by far - is the m2.

 

[Fishrrman]

Close some of those windows in Chrome...

 

[Bigwaff]

i just moved from a 2,3ghz i5 MBP 2019 to a M2 MBP PRO brand new.

Did your MBP 2019 have dedicated GPU?

 

[Jutah]

Did your MBP 2019 have dedicated GPU?

No, just a stock MBP19

 

[MacManiac76]

Well as the old motto goes, unused RAM is wasted RAM. I wouldn't worry about it unless memory pressure gets really high and a lot of page file swapping occurs.

100 tabs open in Chrome is not really meant for a system that has only 16GB of RAM of which some is shared for use as GPU VRAM.

 

[ctjack]

I would say this is unoptimized macos issue. You and i need to find the best one for our 14 pros.

 

[Jutah]

Thank you all guys. Reading here and there i see that the M processors uses RAM in a different way than before.
Another guy on reddit says:

Well I think with the unified memory you are sharing ram and vram, that may be where the 2gb difference come from. Plus, since new MBP have way faster ssd, macos rely more heavily on swap and don't fear filling the memory for a much smoother experience.

that's the answer i think.

Anyway, even when the "yellow zone" appears the machine seems smooth and there's no overheating or lagging in the usage.