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Comment by drooopy | Hacker News Reader

According to the guy behind Asahi Linux, there was no misreporting. It was an actual bug and those excessive write operations happened. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1396374313591140357?ref_...

While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.

But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits that I can think of and basically only serves to give any computer a hard coded expiration date. And thinness is not an excuse. There are computers as thin as the Air that have removable storage drives.

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> But an SSD that's glued on to the motherboard has 0 benefits

It's because, since the T2 chip and going on with Apple Silicon, they're not SSDs in the NVMe sense. They're an Apple-specific technology derived from their Anobit acquisition, that only look like an NVMe device to the upper layers.

Yeah, that's what kills me.

And the only viable mitigation strategies involve giving Apple more money.

Spec'ing a larger onboard SSD to spread out the writes for hopefully longer endurance should be effective.

And, perhaps, opting for more RAM to reduce VM writes to disk? I'm not sure if that's effective. Perhaps the resulting sleep file will be larger as well, resulting on more writes overall. I'm sure somebody can chime in on that?

At least the newer models have SD card slots; can use SD cards for semidurable storage. They are obviously unsuitable for some things, but fine for others.

Not to mention that thinness is not a thing in case of Mac Mini.

"Thin" is also no longer a word I'd use to describe the current M1 Macbook Pros; they're significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel counterparts of old (bigger battery required to achieve that legendary battery life?)

> significantly thicker and heavier than their Intel counterparts

That's really hyperbolic.

The 13" M1 MBP is 0.7mm thicker and 30g heavier than the equivalent Intel of not so old, 2015-2019 when the dimensions dropped to the lower bound.

I have both a 2019 Intel and 2022 M1, and the M1 is more than 0.5KG heavier and more than 0.7mm thicker.

I was surprised to realize they'd made the newer machines significantly thicker and heavier. Both machines have their pros and cons, neither is perfect or terrible.

All specs are available here [0]. Even if you compare different sizes the 14" M1 is still just ~230g heavier than the 13" Intel. At the same size (13") the differences are what I put above. "More than 0.5kg" means almost half the weight of the laptop. You need a 16" M1 Pro to get there.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300

Oops, I'd meant to specify, they are both 16".

Thank you, buran777!

At 16" it would still put them at a barely noticeable 100g (at 2kg) and 0.6mm difference. Even after Apple rid itself of Ive's obsession with thinness they would never go for "significantly thicker and heavier" than the previous model in a portable device.

Can't really think of many (any?) laptops that have this mix of thin, light, high performance, and long battery life.

I agree, I'd prefer longer battery life, and better performance in a slight weight and thickness tradeoff.

Sadly, I've tried PC laptops (Surface tablet, Surface laptops and Asus laptops) and the performance (speed, thermals and battery life) are still nowhere near the Apple M1 hardware. I wish there was better price/performance from apple, but until the PC world has a strong contender, I don't see that happening.

At least Intel has strong competition from AMD now :)

People complained because the thin ones didn't have the ports they wanted.

And they're still complaining because one of the ports they wanted was the M.2 slot for the SSD.

Some things are worth more than saving 10 grams.

> While I don't like it being that way, I can definitely see the benefits of non-upgradeable RAM. The performance of the SOC on my "lowly", entry-level M1 Air is out of this world.

It's not even clear that this has a performance benefit on typical workloads. At release the M1 was non-trivially faster than contemporaneous PC mobiles, but its competition was also using TSMC 7nm and DDR4.

Now we've seen Zen3+ mobiles on 6nm with DDR5 and upgradeable memory and they're about the same speed for nearly everything despite the M1 being on 5nm, which basically proves they didn't need to solder the RAM.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how does non-modular RAM improve performance?

Less Physical Distance should create less latency, plus an optimized profile for one list of model of banks vs the diversity in the modula industry with different clock speeds and latencies.

Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?

And why would the laptops suddenly ship with a variety of modules if they're replaceable? You can still ship it with the same modules in every laptop and get those benefits. And if someone upgrades it, that's still an improvement over no upgrade path, so this makes no sense to me.

> Is there any actual evidence that this marginally lower latency makes any real life difference?

Yes, compare the specs of DDR4 and DDR5 to LPDDR4X and LPDDR5X. The latter are significantly higher performance.

This is also the reason that Dell recently introduced CAMM memory modules -- it is an attempt to address the packaging bottleneck that is limiting the speed of DIMMs currently.

The amount of time that it takes a signal to go down a wire has been relevant for DRAM for a while now. If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time. You can see this even on relatively low performance devices like a Raspberry Pi. https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Rasp...

> If you look at the traces on the board of any relatively modern computer, you'll see some that take circuitous routes, for the purpose of having the signals arrive at the CPU at the same time.

Having all the signals arrive at the same time isn't the same thing as having the signals arrive soon.

Correct. My point was to simply illustrate that the fractions of time involved are small enough that trace length matters.

High bandwidth, low latency unified memory is a central component of the M series architecture and a key reason those chips perform so well at their power profile.

I'm not sure what "evidence" I could provide that would convince you since we don't have high latency Apple chips to benchmark against. However, there's a reason VRAM is soldered onto GPUs.

Soldered RAM doesn't really help much with latency; most of the DRAM latency ocurrs within the chip itself. Where soldering RAM does help is with reaching higher clock speeds with lower power (in phones and laptops), or with reaching clock speeds that are impossible to shove through a DIMM connector (GPUs).

That higher frequency helps phones save on pin count by using a narrow memory bus, and allows laptops to have lots of memory bandwidth to feed the integrated graphics when using typical laptop/desktop bus widths.

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