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Do We Need More than 8gb for iOS Production?
Curious what folks think. I asked @Michael the same question.
Comments
We need as much as we can afford. Developers find new and novel ways to use resources.
Most need more than they afford but make do.
16 GB would be awesome.
Sure. But 32GB would be useful for musical holograms and neural fishnets to catch ideas floating in the ether. We will be replaced by our software at some point.
You joke, but we’re getting closer and closer to real artificial intelligence. It’s not that far off... about another 15-20 years.
In 2001 we're going to the edge of the known Universe to visit the StarChild and get our
parking validated too. I joke.
I swear, Siri is already far smarter than some individuals I know
You think these are for security and prevent bots? We’ve been training AI for years....
I also run out of CPU cycles far before 3gb of RAM. I alternate with upgrading iPads, so 1 is always the current A series available, and 1 the generation before.
I hope they start upgrading the minis with more consistency tho as they are my preferred device (and also use one as my only phone....)
Same thing with those Captchas which feature distorted text which require you to interpret them and enter as regular text. Those are training machine learning algorithms.
They started out for doing optical character recognition on scanned documents. Basically crowd sourced correction for open documents work. I think they are mainly used for training AI for self driving cars now.
YES we need it.
I want the top spec model 16 gb, 2 TB, thunderbolt, etc.
Finally the leadership at APPLE have come to their senses.
Well almost, still NO headphone jack everything else is on point
APPLE raised the bar now developers have to step it up
Competitors will take years to catch up...checkmate
A lot of serious people said that 15-20 years ago, too. One of the interesting consequences of AI development is that we keep learning more and more about how unique our mind actually is. So in a way, it's not that the predictions are wrong, but that we keep moving the goalpost.
I work close to one area of AI, and while I'm not an expert, I don't think we'll have reached that level so soon. IMHO, of course. Noone knows.
The answer is probably more complicated than it should be. On the desktop computer side and laptops too, the more RAM the better. Even if you don't need more RAM it'll probably make everything run smoother and more efficiently.
iOS is weird and the situation it sits in is weird. It does lots of pretty slick stuff to make it run better in reduced amounts of RAM. They've actually brought some of this to MacOS now and I'm really impressed with how well my M1 mini runs with only 8GB of RAM. I've stressed tested it with some really heavy workloads and it rarely sees any memory pressure at all.
The downside to more RAM is it takes more energy. Battery is important on the mobile side, so it is a tradeoff.
I tend to think that 8GB will be enough for almost everything. There are some video related things that are probably coming to the iPad that can really use the 16GB. If you have really big sample libraries then maybe the 16GB would be helpful, but these should really be streaming from disk now days and the disks are insanely fast.
If you need the 1TB or 2TB of storage, look at the added RAM as a nice bonus. If you don't need the added storage, I wouldn't pay that extra $400 or whatever it is to get the 16GB of RAM. For some time to come at least, iOS devs are going to still need to be sensitive to RAM usage so they can support all of the different levels of machines available.
On the music software side of things then I think it mainly depends on how the apps are written and whether we are asking whether it is possible to produce music with less than 8GB (it clearly is!) or whether iPad needs 8GB to draw in the desktop vendors to start making software here. If the app is a port of some desktop behemoth which expects to be able to load everything into memory at once then you are going to need your iPad resources to look a lot like a desktop as most vendors will want as direct a port of their code as possible. Apps which were "born on the iPad" need to have had more thought put in to how much memory they use, a bit like when devs only had KB of memory available to them, so those devs work their magic and you see people demoing 100 track NS2 projects, AudioLayer streaming multi GB samples, and StaffPad playing symphonies.
Also, as audio modelling matures then RAM pressures will further ease on both iOS and desktop.
Can’t wait until we get the quantum synths that make patches automatically by going to the future to find your most successful/popular sounds and come back to the present with it before you even decide what type of sound you want.
I hate those quantum synths. They always collapse my waveforms, and they only support either velocity or position, but not both together, wtf?
Downloading 1.3 PetaByte - Tuvan Throat Collection 2040
Future world problems
That’s the Behringer.
The Roland will 3D print new vocal chords for you.
That’s not Tuvan throat singing. That’s my own future singing voice if I don’t quit smoking soon....
Google will do that for you whether you ask them or not, and then sell it to you or any higher bidder
This is an interesting post from another thread:
Totally not surprised... it's something i'm keeping repeat like parrot again and again for ages - for music apps RAM is not important too much. Especially on iOS it is almost totally irellevant if you have 2,3 or 1000 GB of RAM - in 99% of use cases you get out of CPU way much sooner than out of RAM. Also, some people think bigger RAM has impact to speed - this is absolutely not true (and if you feel like it has it's placebo effect).
Literally EVERYTHING you should care when you are picking HW for you music (no matter if it is iPad or computer) is how fast CPU it has. Rest is almost irrelevant. If you plan to work with large sample libraries and eventually long audio track, then (for desktop computer, obviously for iPad you can choose this) it's wise to choose fast SSD disk.
I don’t know if this is true or not, as I was asking the same sort of questions myself but according to some articles and consensus, ram does make a big difference if you use a lot of sample based instruments, it was broken down like say you use 88 notes in one instrument and it’s 2mb per sample etc... it quickly added up to 4gb or 8gb ram depending on how many instruments and then on top of that you need ram for the os and other processes. This is in real time.
So like I say, I personally don’t know anything about this, just putting what I’d been told and read recently to you and what you were saying to hear what you or others think.. mainly because I’m trying to decide which iPad to go for myself.
I also don’t understand how what you say about this relates to something like the ram limit for audio unit instances on iOS. Because you can very quickly add up ram usage on audio units in a track where many effects are used, and many tracks (3o track song say) and get way over 8 gb? But to reiterate, this is all from a position of my own ignorance in the subject so genuine question.
@dendy, that confirms my opinion. I think I‘ll go with the 12.9 512 GB iPad
I get it. You aspire to be the 2040 version of "the guy who still listens to vinyl". I mean there will be no reason to download anything, and also nowhere to download it to. You will pay as you go to the sound seller.
The only constant will be Apple still taking a large chunk of the money from them.
Whether RAM is a factor is down to how the app or plugin is coded. How the app is coded will often depend on the environment in which it will be run. If you tell a developer they only have 32MB RAM to play with then they need to get creative, tell them they have 32GB and they may cut corners to get things out the door.
Any app working with large sample sets on iOS ought to be streaming them, or at least have the option to do so if the intention is to use them in a DAW. Using AudioLayer, for example, your 88 key sample set would be streamed from disk as needed rather than loaded into memory. There may be some caching done to save having to go to disk each time but most OSes will do some of this for you without you realising.
On the desktop you have OS bloat, then the host DAW and then any number of plugins which might be written assuming they have as much RAM or CPU as they can eat. Something like NS2 on the other hand is so well coded that if you stick to Obsidian and the built in effects then there is not a realistic limit on the number of tracks you can use.
Wise words.
+1000
At least for now, the RAM usage limit for all instances of an extension is still there. It may get raised a bit more on the iPad Pro, but it isn't going to go away. Having 16GB of RAM isn't going to make any given AU work better with samples or anything. It will allow you to run more tracks though if that is actually a limiting factor for you now.
What about the DSP performance? I always thought that for audio it is even more important than the CPU. And I thought the DSP is a piece of hardware on the SoC chip, right?
It depends on the DSP you need to run. The DSP is on the SoC. The RAM at least for my DSP usage isn't going to help. Mostly, you only run small, around audio buffer sized chunks to the DSP at a time.