Let's think about that a little bit. If the RAM is fast and the SSD is fast and the virtualization options are limited, then this is good enough?
Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.
SSD latency is still several orders of magnitude higher than RAM latency. Having similar magnitudes of total throughput (bandwidth) isn't enough to make RAM and SSDs comparable and thus remove the need for more RAM. Random access latency with basically no queue depth is very important for total performance. Certainly, SSDs are far better at this than hard drives were... but, SSDs still serve a different purpose.
Intel's Optane SSDs are based on a completely different technology than other SSDs, and their low queue depth latency is significantly better than any other SSDs out there, but good luck talking Apple into using more Intel stuff just when they're trying to switch away, and even then... just having some more real RAM would be better for most of these creator/pro workloads.
I have a project that won’t compile on systems with less than 32 GiB of RAM, and I refuse to refactor the hideously overgrown C++ template magic that landed me here.
Their performance claims are the very essence of vague, but Apple sure seems certain it will be great for software engineering. I'm curious. I won't be convinced until we get some real data, but signs seem to point that way. What makes you strongly suspect it won't be great?
Build code in Xcode up to 2.8x faster.
[...]
Compile four times as much code on a single charge, thanks to the game-changing performance per watt of the M1 chip.
I have a hunch it will be adequate for single-threaded tasks and the real gains will come for multithreaded compilation, since its superior thermals should enable it to run all cores at full blast for longer periods of time without throttling, relative to the intel silicon it replaces.
You are downvoted, but you are right. In Asia (esp India, Indonesia, Phillipines & China) but also in the EU, I see 'most developers' walking around with PC (Linux or Windows=>mostly Windows of course) laptops. I would say that by a very large margin 'most developers' on earth use Windows machines.
The most vocal and visible (and rich) ones have Macbook's though, i guess that's where the idea comes from.
I'm guessing some took issue with the possibly poorly phrased "our understanding [...] of what [...] 'developers' mean [differ]". It can be read as me dismissing people that use Macs as "not real developers", where my intent was to counteract the opposite: people dismissing others that might be using Windows as "not real developers" because otherwise they would be using Macs, which is circular logic that I have heard expressed in the past. And I say that as someone who has used Macs at work for the past decade.
It's actually from the 2020 survey in 2019 windows was at 47,5% and in 2018 at 49,9%. Unfortunately this metric apparently wasn't tracked in 2017 so we'll never be sure if they were above 50% back then.
So currently the majority of responding dev use a POSIX (mostly)-compliant operating system. That is actual food for thought.
Which processes really require occupying and
allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
It's not uncommon to work with e.g. 50GB+ databases these days.
They don't always need to be in RAM, particularly with modern SSD performance, but if you're using a laptop for your day job and you work with largeish data...
Containers on Mac rely on virtualization, don't they still? Will the new CPU arch have a native virtualization SW? Because if not, I suspect that the virtualization layer might break with the translations to and from X86, and/or might take pretty significant performance penalty.
A wild unsubstantiated guess of course, at this point (or rather, a worry of mine).
Containers on Mac still rely on virtualization, but Apple said at WWDC (and showed a demo) of Docker for Mac running on Apple Silicon, and of Parallels running a full Debian VM. Both were running ARM builds of Linux to run properly, and Apple added virtualization extensions to the new SoC so it doesn't have to resort to emulation (if the software running is ARM and not x86).
Or, inspire me. Which processes really require occupying and allocating bigger blocks of RAM?
I personally don't want to purchase another machine with 16gb RAM but that's mainly because I want the option of having a powerful Windows guest or two running at the same time. But if you take out that possibility, for now, what if the paradigm has changed just a tad.