Going to replace my 2016 MBP with a 2019 16" model. My 2016 has 16gb Ram/1TB SSD, 2.7GHz i7.
Likely the new one will be an i9/1 or 2TB SSD, just wondering about RAM. What are the scenarios where having 64gb over 32gb will make things better? My 16gb hasn’t failed me yet, but curious what I’d see with the additional RAM?
Programming, Web, e-mail, some (but rare) video conversion/rendering, Zoom are my main uses.
my personal opinion, unless you are doing heavy duty photo/video editing… 32gb is far and away enough
I’d agree
I tend to run several VM’s at the same time and 32 Gb works well as it lets me allocated > 4Gb per VM which often they need to work well
I’m sure if I was editing live video or 4K video etc more ram than 32 would be better but I dont so …
Ironically video editing requires more VRAM than actual RAM, as it’s predominately done on the graphics card now.
If you have 64GB, you can use some of that as a RAM scratch disk, which is sooooooooooooo much faster than the built-in SSD. I did some experiments this year when using a 3rd prty command line tool to process images, my app would create the RAM disk, write the image data to the RAM disk, execute 3rd party tool (which then operated nearly instantly) and then move the results from the RAM disk to the users SSD. It was incredible.
But creating a RAM disk takes time, so that ate all the performance improvements and it cannot be done with a Sandboxed application.
I have the 2019 MBP with 32GB, and it’s been plenty. I frequently find myself wishing I’d opted for 64GB—think of all the VMs I could run and how much memory I could allocate to some of them—but the reality is I’ve never had memory pressure above 50% even when running two VMs, and most of the time my memory pressure is <25%. Right now, for instance, after restarting my MBP a couple of days ago, and currently running Xojo, Chrome, Word, and about 20 other apps (utilities mainly), my memory pressure is sitting at 14%.
Thanks, all!
2.3ghz vs 2.4? Seems like such a small step in speed for a bunch more dough…
When I purchased the 16" I bought this year, I tried to quantify the performance gain v.s. cost. I kept coming up with really poor numbers. Ironically the 6-core i7 was the best performance per buck, with the 2.3 i9 coming in second and the 2.4 the absolute worst. I opted for the 2.3 i9 as I felt the cost to upgrade from the 6-core was potentially worth the extra 2 cores (not for the Xojo IDE, but one of my apps has a custom plugin which uses GCD, so it can access all those cores and HT).
core count maybe ?
Nope. Both i9, both 8 core. In the past, the speed jumps were more significant?
usually yes
but now more cores is what they seem to push more than faster cores
I will say I’m fine with the 2.6 Ghz 6 core machine