[drdaeman]

That was all x86_64, but even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic, and 8GiB was borderline unusable even 10 years ago.

Nowadays it must be a teeth-grinding tight fit for a browser and couple Electron apps, held together on a prayer next website doesn’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles and wasn’t vibeslopped with utter disregard to any big-Os.

[pastel8739]

> even if aarch64 is more memory efficient, it can’t be too drastic

Why not? All the other advantages of M processors (performance, battery life) have absolutely been drastic

[drdaeman]

Because look around - same code compiled for x86_64 and aarch64 is not that drastically different in size, save for some special cases (like NumPy). Data structures are going to have even less differences. Then, assets are the same.

I’ve cursorily checked few programs and difference seemed to about 10-20% (with some exceptions), so 8GiB RAM on an aarch64 is like 10GB on x86_64. Significantly nicer, not a life-changing nicer - you’re still very limited.

Edit: Next comment has a very good point about memory and SSD bandwidth increases, allowing faster swap and compressed RAM performance. That’s something I haven’t considered. So maybe it’ll feel closer to a 16GiB old machine or something like that…

[josephg]

Yeah. Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era. The performance impact of moving applications in and out of swap should be much lower than it was a few years ago.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Also the bandwidth of modern soldered-on Mac SSDs is insane compared to where it was in the Intel era.

This is because they're newer, not because they're soldered. PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives can do ~15GB/s without being soldered.

[drdaeman]

That’s a fair point, I totally missed this factor, mostly thinking about binary sizes. You’re right, it would be different because of this.