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8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Don't they also solder it to the motherboard so you can't upgrade your RAM as well?
It’s not so much soldered to the motherboard as much as part of the same package as the CPU. As in: there are no separate memory chips.
But they did indeed solder it in before that, on their old Intel laptops. I think they started doing that in 2013 or 2014 but I forget exactly.
That has more to do with faster traces; the ram is “closer” to the CPU so the signal is cleaner.
Not defending the move, I’d take upgradability in a laptop.
Only makes a difference at oc levels of manual tuning. Which apple isn't doing at their factory I reckon.
I mean, when you’re the one manufacturing the board, I’m pretty sure you could eek out some more baseline performance without having to tweak each one for OC in the production line, my dude.
At 100gb/s for the base model there probably actively downclocking the ram to make the higher end models more attractive.
This is both great, and incredibly annoying because they selected 8gb as the base…
So wait- if you want to increase your RAM, you have to install a whole new CPU?
That's soldered as well! It's theoretically possible but way too involved for most to bother with hiring a professional to get it done or what have you.
No, you just buy one with the amount of RAM you need.
Imagine buying a laptop at all
Sincerely, A Framework user
Imagine spending $400 for 24GB of ram.
Sincerely, another Framework user
You don’t buy a laptop, you have your employer buy it for you.
Lol, the ram is part of the m3 chip That’s a reason why it is so efficient. The storage in m3 is for RAM and videoRAM.
Wikipedia: The M3's Unified Memory Architecture features up to 24 GB RAM, the M3 Pro up to 36 GB, and the M3 Max up to 128 GB. Like the M2 generation, the M3 SoCs use 6,400 MT/s LPDDR5 SDRAM. As with prior M series SoCs, this serves as both RAM and video RAM.
That's literally how Intel integrated GPUs work too
The RAM being shared with the GPU, that is.
Yea but the RAM is not on the located within the chip design, is it?
With Apple's chips the RAM is all on the CPU die so both CPU and GPU get the performance benefit. With Intel's, none of it is.
"What Apple calls “unified memory” is RAM (random-access memory) used as “main memory” (not a CPU or GPU cache and not mass storage either).
The term “unified” refers to the fact that the memory is shared by the CPU cores and the GPU cores. That’s not novel: “integrated graphics” options in Intel x86 chips (like Iris Xe) do the same, as do just about all modern smartphones."
I'm not talking about the merits or otherwise of "unified memory", I'm pointing out that because Apple's RAM is physically integrated into the CPU, it can provide more memory bandwidth than regular DDR5 DIMMs.
Well yeah, if you were paying $50 a GB wouldn't you too? Got to lock that shit down!