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by wolvoleo 90 days ago
Well yes it's still only 8GB shared between macos, the VM and the graphics buffers. On a mobile chip.
3 comments

> On a mobile chip

That's not really a thing with Apple Silicon. The A series chips and the M series have the same CPU and GPU core designs.

Because you don't need to support Thunderbolt 4/5 controllers, PCIe lanes for NVMe storage, ProRes encode/decode engines (on Pro/Max/Ultra tiers) and multiple external displays in a device like a phone, Apple TV, or a HomePod these features are absent from A series chips.

The A17 Pro corresponds to the M3, the A18/A18 Pro corresponds to the M4 and the A19/A19 Pro corresponds to the M5. Same core design, different implementations.

It's not like Intel where there are many server processors, desktop processors and mobile processors. Apple uses the same core design they scale up or down as needed, for example the S series chips in the Apple Watch. The S9 is a scaled down A13 or A15.

I don't think Apple has used "desktop chips" in a looong time. With the lone exception of the Xeon Mac Pros.
People whip out “mobile chip” like this thing is going to crawl. It is faster than the Apple M1 (and runs the same software).