It only took 25 years, but laptop memory is about to level up. We’ve got the first hands-on look at LPCAMM2, the new memory standard that’s about to change e...
This memory has1/4 the bandwidth of M series Mac’s. It may be possible to match current memory with 4 chips. But that would take a lot of room. And that leaves little room for growth.
Benchmarks are of course just benchmarks, but the single-core performance is better for the M2, and the range-topping M2 is about 2x faster than the i9.
Also, regardless of how something compares, if it is ever memory-bandwidth bound, then faster RAM should help. While most tasks may be CPU or IO bound, AFAIK there can still easily be memory bound tasks in real-world workloads.
I picked the i9-11900k for comparison since I think that was the last one to only support DDR4 (making it “DDR4 era”). Ryzen maybe faster in the DDR4 era though?
I wouldn’t really trust this site. Videos that go through a lot of different benchmarks /programs and games are way better.
This shows the M2 being pretty average/normal between other laptop CPUs: https://youtu.be/FWfJq0Y4Oos
The things that’s impressive about the M[x] chips are their efficiency. Apple basically lying with the performance graphs they put out is really frustrating when they have an actual amazing metric they could show: power consumption.
That’s what a RISC architecture is good at
Why is bandwidth so important? The M2 is about half as fast as a DDR4 era x86 desktop processor with half the memory bandwidth.
This memory has1/4 the bandwidth of M series Mac’s. It may be possible to match current memory with 4 chips. But that would take a lot of room. And that leaves little room for growth.
When the memory is shared with the GPU, bandwidth becomes much more important. A desktop will just use a dedicated GPU if it needs the performance.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5533vs3904vs4922/Apple-M2-Ultra-24-Core-vs-Intel-i9-11900K-vs-Apple-M2-8-Core-3500-MHz
Benchmarks are of course just benchmarks, but the single-core performance is better for the M2, and the range-topping M2 is about 2x faster than the i9.
Also, regardless of how something compares, if it is ever memory-bandwidth bound, then faster RAM should help. While most tasks may be CPU or IO bound, AFAIK there can still easily be memory bound tasks in real-world workloads.
I picked the i9-11900k for comparison since I think that was the last one to only support DDR4 (making it “DDR4 era”). Ryzen maybe faster in the DDR4 era though?
I wouldn’t really trust this site. Videos that go through a lot of different benchmarks /programs and games are way better. This shows the M2 being pretty average/normal between other laptop CPUs: https://youtu.be/FWfJq0Y4Oos
And this shows M2 Ultra vs the top Intel CPU at that time: https://youtu.be/buLyy7x2dcQ
The things that’s impressive about the M[x] chips are their efficiency. Apple basically lying with the performance graphs they put out is really frustrating when they have an actual amazing metric they could show: power consumption. That’s what a RISC architecture is good at