MacBookPro Question?

RAM "shared with system" used to be pejorative, because it meant refreshing the display was competing with system operation. The M1 designs to date all use "unified" RAM, and are intended to have display fetches interleaved with CPU fetches. Since they were designed for operating that way, there is:

• no Memory slowdown from sharing unified RAM for the display as well as the CPU

• no performance penalty from having to move stuff back and forth to a separate display RAM

• no performance penalty for not having a separate, Discrete GPU -- the built-in GPU is plenty fast, and

options with more GPU cores are available if your work depends higher performance

• arbitrarily-much display RAM available, because all RAM is a unified RAM machine is managed together

When specifying how much RAM to buy in a new M1 Mac, you should allow for some portion of the "unified" RAM being used used for display purposes. A good starting point would be to add 4GB to what you thought would be enough, and if that crosses over a dividing line, order the next size up. (e.g., If you think about 14GB would be enough for your programs. Then add 4GB to that. The new total passes the 16GB mark, so order 32GB instead.)

Apple developed their own complete System on a Chip (SoC) architecture that operates much more efficient than any other competing system.

▷ Read all about it here. 