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8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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They're using shared RAM because that's what pretty much everybody has been doing for over a decade, including Apple themselves. They can have some smaller other bits also use the main memory now as they have control over everything with their own chips, but that's pretty much it.
Doing that also doesn't only have advantages - for example, on a phone the baseband also uses a segmented off bit of memory. If this is exploitable (or has a backdoor for law enforcement) you can bypass a phones security restrictions to read memory contents.
What Apple is doing quite well is how they handle swapping (that is, moving stuff that no longer fits into RAM to disk, and back) - on an 8GB Mac you'll typically see some swap usage, even if the system is not much used. I recently got a 16GB MacBook Air for work - it uses up pretty much all the memory without much running. Some of that are caches, which can be freed without too much performance impact, but there are quite a few workloads I wouldn't run on that thing to avoid constant swapping.