Even the RAM and SSD stats you cite are apples and oranges - both have gotten dramatically faster in the last decade.
Not to be rude, but a poor understanding of computers would be to think that speed is all that matters. Software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years. What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
> What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
If the swapping is fast enough not to be noticeable, then speed is all that matters. In fact, if SSDs were about as fast as RAM, we wouldn't need RAM at all!
The whole reason why we have all these layers of memory (disk, RAM, L3, L2 and L1 cache, etc) is exactly speed, nothing else. The closer to the CPU, the faster, but also more expensive.
NVME is around two orders of magnitude slower than DDR3 RAM, so as soon as your heap is tapped out you'll hit a performance wall.
As I sit here and type this, my 10.15.7 Catalina desktop is sitting at 12.25Gb of used memory with 2 Edge tabs and an open Citrix session. Any actual, professional use will put you way north of even 16gb.
Just in case anyone was curious, I looked into this recently, assuming 7-8GB/s was pretty darn fast, but dual channel DDR2 RAM was doing such speeds in 2002. So a high end SSD is about as fast as 20 year old memory, if you ignore latency.
I was interested until I saw it tops out at 8gb. My environment typically needs just over 16gb.
That's just some handwaving complain that doesn't mean much.
>What good is 16GB of super fast RAM if the machine is swapping out to disk regularly?
Try
- opening 2 Linux/Windows VMs on that 2012 laptop
- or opening a big Logic project with 100 tracks, convolution reverbs, high end AU/VSTs, and so on
- or opening and editing several 8K, ney, 4K video streams, and slap some VFX nodes on them...
- or running a programming IDE like Idea
- or compiling a large C++ codebase
... and several other tasks, and compare running the same on the 2022 machine.
Since "software has only been getting more and more complex and bloated over the last 10 years" it should be comparable, right?
Unless you want to run VMs. Then more RAM is generally more better.
