Is it possible to run VM and SDL Trados on Macbook Air M1 2020 with 8GB of RAM?

Khalim88 wrote:

Hello, guys

I have been wondering if it's possible to run VM and SDL Trados (translation software) on my Macbook Air M1 2020 with 8GB of RAM. For this case, I will plan to install Windows 10/11 on the VM.

SDL – Trados

SDL – Trados Studio FAQ

This is Windows-only software that runs on Windows 10 and 11. The minimum requirement is 8 GB of RAM, but the vendor recommends 16 GB of RAM. That would be on a PC where Windows is the host OS. I see no indication that the vendor provides a Windows/ARM version of the software, so I would assume that the software is Windows/Intel only. (Hopefully it does not use any Intel-only device drivers, as Windows 11 for ARM cannot run those.)

This means that if you can run the application on a M1 MacBook Air, you will be running it inside of Microsoft's Intel emulation environment, inside a copy of Windows 11 for ARM that is itself running inside of a virtual machine. Intel versions of Windows are not compatible with Apple-Silicon-based Macs – and neither Apple nor Microsoft support running Windows 11 for ARM as a dual-boot ("host", "Boot Camp") OS on an Apple Silicon Mac.

That might imply that an Apple Silicon Mac would need at least 24 GB of RAM to run the application well. Even then you would be looking at a couple of layers of overhead: the overhead of running Windows inside of a virtual machine, and the overhead of running an Intel application with the aid of an emulator or translator.

Microsoft Support – Options for using Windows 11 with Mac® computers with Apple® M1®, M2™, and M3™ chips

Parallels – Run Windows 11 on Macs with Apple silicon with Microsoft-authorized Parallels Desktop

Parallels – Knowledge Base – Limitations of running Windows 11 on Apple silicon Mac computers in Parallels Desktop for Mac

Parallels – Parallels Desktop for Mac Technical Documentation & Resources

"Supported guest operating systems (Mac with Apple silicon):

Only Arm versions of operating systems are supported."

No, 8GB of RAM is not enough memory. 8GB of RAM is barely enough just for macOS.

While Win11 has a minimum memory requirement of only 4GB, I doubt that is enough to actually do anything useful.

Khalim88 wrote:

But I read in Reddit that Mac can use this swap memory of GBs for heavy use with no issues.

Don't believe everything that you read.

So I assume my Mac will use this swap memory whatever it takes without causing any slowdown as long as my ROM is sufficient.

Especially if someone talks about swapping the contents of working memory to "ROM." ROM stands for Read-Only Memory. If your computer does any swapping, it would be to the startup disk – typically the internal SSD.