8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple

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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
macrumors.com

8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple::Following the unveiling of new MacBook Pro models last week, Apple surprised some with the introduction of a base 14-inch MacBook Pro with M3 chip,...

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Definitely true, but I will say Mac has pretty decent compression on RAM. I’m assuming that’s why they feel this way. My old MBP 2013 had 8, and I used it constantly until earlier this year when I finally upgraded. It was doing pretty well all things considered, mostly because of on the fly RAM compression.

Lower end macs tend to have slower SSDs so this could be a double whammy on these machines.

I’m specifically talking about the in memory compression, not swap.

But memory compression works the same way swap works. When memory is needed LRU page is written on disk compressed, and where application needs to read data from compressed page it generates pagefault and OS loads(decompresses) page in memory. That's it.

Pretty sure windows has been doing some pretty efficient RAM compression of its own since 98SE or something

They actually just it in Windows 10. There were third party add ons to do so prior to then, but they had marginal impact from my experience.

Did you know that you could do RAM compression on "old" MBP 2013? All you had to do is install Linux and enable memory compression.