16gb or 32gb with Apple Silicon

[Jac459]

I am trying to finalise my target dream laptop.

Today I have an 8gb mb air m1. The memory pressure is quite high. I am at 6-7gb usage for 8gb and I have 2GB swap (yet, my computer seems to handle it very well but I wonder if it generates addtional wear and tears).
I am using Bitwig, a lot of plugins like the Reason Rack, Pigments, Phase Plants and many many other VSTs, Fabfiler, Neutron and Ozone for mixing and mastering (all in the same session if I can).
Even this way my 8GB survives (but memory pressure can be very high). Does it mean that 16GB is enough ? Going to 32GB add a whopping 400USD to the global computer cost, so I would like to avoid buying it if it is just to avoid swapping every 2 months...

What do you think ?

[uOpt]

If it runs without noticeable (outside tools) problems now then doubling the memory should be enough.

Also, if you are in the US you have weeks to return thingie if it turns out to not be enough.

[Jac459]

Thanks for the feedback. That's also what I am starting to think...

[Jac459]

Finally bought the m2pro with 16gb. My memory usage is 12gb max on all my recent tracks, no swap.

Looks perfect to me.

One day it won't be enough, that will be when anyway the cpu is not enough either...

[sQeetz]

Memory pressure on my 2 years old Macbook (16GB) was maxing out a lot... Hope the new 32GB M2 Pro Mac mini minimises that I also tend to multitask a lot... YMMW

[jdoo]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

[Jac459]

Actually, I have the my MBP M2 with 16GB since 2 weeks. I was planning to trial and purchase 32GB if not enough.
My experience so far is I rarely go beyond 13GB usage and never went beyond 14GB.
I am using Bitwig with some heavy plugins like the reason rack and I am not very mindful of resource consumption.
My songs have various bounced tracks but not all, I generally bounce only when I want to do some specific manipulations on the track.
All my tracks have 3-5 effects + izotope plug ins...

So I think it is quite reasonably heavy sessions but keep in mind that I don't generally use big samples.

A remark: while I am far in term of memory consumption, I have already toped the CPU usage once.
So I don't think buying a laptop with the ida that if you take 32 gb to be ready for the next 10 years is realistic.
You will be caught up by CPU...

[uOpt]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

No. There is nothing special there. Memory management in macOS works the same for intel and apple silicon, and a megabyte of application memory is still a megabyte of application memory.

[Jac459]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

No. There is nothing special there. Memory management in macOS works the same for intel and apple silicon, and a megabyte of application memory is still a megabyte of application memory.

A guess you didn't do the research... Try to google "UMA" you will understand that the memory management is actually totally different.

Yet you are right, a megabyte is a megabyte. The difference is in gpu vs cpu allocation.

The reason why it is said that m1 doesn't need much memory is in fact due to the fixed architecture using "nvme ssd" hard drive. Basically you can swap the whole day, nobody gives a shit. You won't feel it.

That is not at all specific to Mac, PC have nvme since long, the only specific is of course that pc world is more diverse. So not all of have nvme when all m1 have nvme.

If you look at my example, I use 12-13gb in average. Before my mbp, I was having a macbook air with 8gb of ram and 256gb of hard drive. I NEVER got a problem with ram, for 2 years. My air was swapping happily and silently without impact.
What I don't know is if swapping 100% of time is reducing the ssd life cycle. But I can tell you that for two years it worked well.

Now I agree that it is difficult to separate bullshit from real stuff from apple marketing speech, they are the worst when other companies are already bad. I mean "retina display" or "dynamic island" is just an hilarious joke.
But the m1 stuff is legit... That's why they are so much in advance compare to the windows surface on ARM...

[uOpt]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

No. There is nothing special there. Memory management in macOS works the same for intel and apple silicon, and a megabyte of application memory is still a megabyte of application memory.

A guess you didn't do the research... Try to google "UMA" you will understand that the memory management is actually totally different.

Yet you are right, a megabyte is a megabyte. The difference is in gpu vs cpu allocation.

The reason why it is said that m1 doesn't need much memory is in fact due to the fixed architecture using "nvme ssd" hard drive. Basically you can swap the whole day, nobody gives a shit. You won't feel it.

That is not at all specific to Mac, PC have nvme since long, the only specific is of course that pc world is more diverse. So not all of have nvme when all m1 have nvme.

If you look at my example, I use 12-13gb in average. Before my mbp, I was having a macbook air with 8gb of ram and 256gb of hard drive. I NEVER got a problem with ram, for 2 years. My air was swapping happily and silently without impact.
What I don't know is if swapping 100% of time is reducing the ssd life cycle. But I can tell you that for two years it worked well.

Now I agree that it is difficult to separate bullshit from real stuff from apple marketing speech, they are the worst when other companies are already bad. I mean "retina display" or "dynamic island" is just an hilarious joke.
But the m1 stuff is legit... That's why they are so much in advance compare to the windows surface on ARM...

There is a very fast SSD, true. If you gonna page, then paging to a very fast SSD is better than paging to a regular SSD.

But saying that just getting less memory than you need and paging all day long is a viable option is a stretch. Saying so for audio applications is sketchy.

Paging is always very expensive even if you have fast storage. In addition to the delay in getting the pages you need a lot of CPU calculations to place and find things in the pagefile.

I have a feeling that you don't page nearly as much as you think you do. Did you run `vmstat` or a similar tools while running audio apps?

ETA: in addition, the very latest Intel Macbooks had SSDs almost as fast as M1 (I think they are literally the same flash chips). So pinning a revolution on M1 is not right. If you are happy with paging speed on M1 you probably would have been fine on the latest Intel units.

[Jac459]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

No. There is nothing special there. Memory management in macOS works the same for intel and apple silicon, and a megabyte of application memory is still a megabyte of application memory.

A guess you didn't do the research... Try to google "UMA" you will understand that the memory management is actually totally different.

Yet you are right, a megabyte is a megabyte. The difference is in gpu vs cpu allocation.

The reason why it is said that m1 doesn't need much memory is in fact due to the fixed architecture using "nvme ssd" hard drive. Basically you can swap the whole day, nobody gives a shit. You won't feel it.

That is not at all specific to Mac, PC have nvme since long, the only specific is of course that pc world is more diverse. So not all of have nvme when all m1 have nvme.

If you look at my example, I use 12-13gb in average. Before my mbp, I was having a macbook air with 8gb of ram and 256gb of hard drive. I NEVER got a problem with ram, for 2 years. My air was swapping happily and silently without impact.
What I don't know is if swapping 100% of time is reducing the ssd life cycle. But I can tell you that for two years it worked well.

Now I agree that it is difficult to separate bullshit from real stuff from apple marketing speech, they are the worst when other companies are already bad. I mean "retina display" or "dynamic island" is just an hilarious joke.
But the m1 stuff is legit... That's why they are so much in advance compare to the windows surface on ARM...

There is a very fast SSD, true. If you gonna page, then paging to a very fast SSD is better than paging to a regular SSD.

But saying that just getting less memory than you need and paging all day long is a viable option is a stretch. Saying so for audio applications is sketchy.

Paging is always very expensive even if you have fast storage. In addition to the delay in getting the pages you need a lot of CPU calculations to place and find things in the pagefile.

I have a feeling that you don't page nearly as much as you think you do. Did you run `vmstat` or a similar tools while running audio apps?

ETA: in addition, the very latest Intel Macbooks had SSDs almost as fast as M1 (I think they are literally the same flash chips). So pinning a revolution on M1 is not right. If you are happy with paging speed on M1 you probably would have been fine on the latest Intel units.

Nobody said it was m1 revolution. Even not apple, they were talking about gpu/cpu sharing... your point is different, as we were both saying.
For the swapping, I don't know, I was just looking at memory pressure, and the system saying it uses 12gb ...

[uOpt]

Nobody said it was m1 revolution. Even not apple, they were talking about gpu/cpu sharing... your point is different, as we were both saying.
For the swapping, I don't know, I was just looking at memory pressure, and the system saying it uses 12gb ...

The OS always keeps some memory free, so that it can react fast to new demands. 12 GB taken in a 16 GB machine can't really be interpreted either way without looking at paging activity.

The commandline utility `vmstat` shows you a more useful stat. Run it like this `vmstat 10` and it prints a line every 10 seconds. Look at the "po" column. That is the number of pageouts the OS has done, which is the best indicator that you ran out of RAM.

[Jac459]

The OS always keeps some memory free, so that it can react fast to new demands. 12 GB taken in a 16 GB machine can't really be interpreted either way without looking at paging activity.

The commandline utility `vmstat` shows you a more useful stat. Run it like this `vmstat 10` and it prints a line every 10 seconds. Look at the "po" column. That is the number of pageouts the OS has done, which is the best indicator that you ran out of RAM.

Mate, we are not understanding each other. I was continuing the previous discussion.
When I am talking about 10-12gb usage, I am talking of my previous config.
My point was to say that before my mb pro, I was on a mb air 8gb/256gb. This computer was swapping 100% of the time because of my usage. At the beginning I remember googling and confirming with a command line, I guess the one you are mentioning.

So basically I am not doing any projection or supposition. I am just sharing my past and factual experience which is => my mb air was swapping all day with no issue of performance at all. I just upgraded because of screen and cpu (and actually, the cpu boost is not jaw dropping at all).

Now if I may guess, based on my usage, my cpu was not working on moving a lot of data I think, it was essentially doing a lot of dsp. Basically I started to have issue with the spectral plugins of bitwig and piling convolution reverbs.... Not very much when loading lots of samples...

[SuperG]

Memory on my older iMac and MacBook Pro were maxing out a lot also. These are 10 year old systems though. Apple M2 / Pro have a different architecture, and the memory consumption is a fraction of the older Intel-based architectures. It's worth doing a little research, or digging in on tech sites to get the real skinny. 16GB on my new M2-Pro based system, has a boatload of memory headroom. Point is.. you cant really equate the older RAM need/use against the new.

ARM memory consumption a fraction of intel?

Somebody doesn't know their RISC from CISC and is spewing gobbledygook.

[jdoo]

Apologies if I misrepresented detail. I don't know RISC or CISC? Jezzus, I struck a nerve. Take it offline boys, if you want to challenge my background. In any case.. 16GB on the newer M2 Pro has given me a shitload of headroom. It's all good.