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8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests (www.macrumors.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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8GB RAM in M3 MacBook Pro Proves the Bottleneck in Real-World Tests::Apple's new MacBook Pro models are powered by cutting-edge M3 Apple silicon, but the base configuration 14-inch model starting at $1,599...

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[–] 35 points 2 years ago (21 children)

Don't they also solder it to the motherboard so you can't upgrade your RAM as well?

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago (13 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Only makes a difference at oc levels of manual tuning. Which apple isn't doing at their factory I reckon.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    So wait- if you want to increase your RAM, you have to install a whole new CPU?

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    No, you just buy one with the amount of RAM you need.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    That's literally how Intel integrated GPUs work too

    The RAM being shared with the GPU, that is.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    "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."

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    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.

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