It doesn’t get said enough. Apple is a RAM vendor. 50% margin on the base config. 95% margin on memory upgrades.
1 Like
Not really true:
It is important to know that HBM is about five times pricier than DDR5. It commands a significantly higher cost due to its superior performance and capacity advantages over standard DRAMs. The complexity of constructing HBM memory devices and stacks is also notably higher compared to traditional DDR ICs and modules.6 May 2024
Highest performance comes at a price.
Apple isn’t shipping HBM. They’re shipping LPDDR (although in a non-JDEC spec)
4 Likes
I was that clever as I bought a Mac mini with 256 GB plus external Thunderbird SSD with 1 TB. While I find this configuration usable for me, I can’t unconditionally recommend it.
First, having data not where the OS expect them to be tends to cause troubles with access privileges. On setting up my Mac the first time I intended to have my user folder on the external disk – which is possible in theory. That worked until an OS update… After prolonged fights, I gave up on it. After all, the main reason I prefer Mac is that I actually want just to use my computer to get the things done, not to mess around with the OS. Then I gave up on having Music and Photos libraries as well as Julia projects on that disk - meaning, even though I don’t have that much there by modern standards, my system disk is pretty full now.
Second, I had occasional crashes leading to computer restart. While not often, that almost never happened to me before on Macs. I tracked the crashes tentatively to external disk (communication) glitches when running an application from that disk. After all applications were moved onto internal disk, I never had such crashes anymore.
3 Likes
Thanks for sharing.
I did not experience this solution myself since I bought a quite expensive version (MBP M1Max 64 GB / 2To) a few years ago in a professional context and feel no need to upgrade ever since.
So the conclusion remains the same: Apple makes very large margin on SSD and RAM upgrades.
The competition gets better though, and I will be very happy to return to Linux OS when one of the competitors (AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, NVidia…) manage to offer a similar performance (per Watt).
1 Like
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
1 Like
This benchmark is good but it is not clear if it exploits all 16 threads or not. Perhaps it would have been better to try and set JULIA_NUM_THREADS=1, and repeat the benchmark. This way we know (or have an idea) about single core performance. Would you be kind enough to update your results with single core tests? Then I can give you some pseudocode you can run to also test Sparse Matrix performance which is mostly used in numerical computing.