I’m a web developer but I also do tons of work with large files being transferred across the network, I do some CPU intensive tasks from time to time, run Docker containers, etc. all on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM.
Well it’s 2024 now and the thing still screams. So what I don’t understand is: why are there suddenly so many enraged tech news websites bashing on the 8GB base RAM?
I get it that some people need more than just 8GB, but for the cliche web browsing, email and social media user it’s not adding up to me why anyone is so enraged about this.
I guess we got used to massive ram increase/requirements in the past few years due to x86/64 architecture and such, that 8GB now seems completely obsolete. ARM works differently and more efficiently which would explain the lower specs for same or better results.
That’s how I see it at least.
I am sorry, but you are confidently incorrect.
It is absolutely true that x86_64 and ARM are two different CPU architectures, this does not mean that RAM usage differs hugely between them, that has more to do with the OS.
If you want to load a 20MB raw image into ram to edit it, it will take 20MB of ram regardless of CPU arcitecture.
The reason we are used to using so much ram is that as hardware capabillities have increased, so have software requirenments.
The processor architecture does not influence RAM usage. (At least not if both architectures are 64-bit)