(novice question) 64gb is pure RAM? I thought Apple Silicon was efficient at pag... | Hacker News

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		slimebot80 25 days ago \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in... (novice question) 64gb is pure RAM? I thought Apple Silicon was efficient at paging SSD as memory storage - how important is RAM if you've got a fast SSD?

ethan_smith 25 days ago | [–]

While Apple Silicon's memory compression and SSD swapping are efficient, RAM access is still ~100x faster than SSD, so sufficient physical RAM remains crucial for memory-intensive workloads like running large LLMs.

nicce 25 days ago | [–]

Memory speed is the most important factor with LLMs and SSD is very slow when compared to RAM.

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