Question on Apple Silicon, best bet for large (138GB) GarageSale Library

[ilja]

@MTB_Matt

• Is it RAM–I have 8GB now and everyone I’ve talked to said 16GB is now a must, but that advice was given in a general, more-is-better computing sense and not specifically in regard to the GarageSale’s memory demands

16GB should be fine. If you can afford more, that’s good, but I doubt you’ll see performance benefits beyond 16 GB (unless you have a lot of other apps running at the same time as GS).

@MTB_Matt

With the base/Pro/Max variants within each chip class, is the huge increase in multi-core performance between chip levels relevant to GarageSale, or does it instead depend on the chip’s single core power?

For GS, single core performance is king. Since on macOS interfaces updates can only happen on the main thread of an app, and updating the user interface (smart groups, overview summaries, etc.) in response to user actions or data received from eBay is what is responsible for small hangs in GS, you won’t see much performance improvements with more cores.
There is not much hard computing in GarageSale that could be offloaded to secondary threads. And the tasks that already happen on secondary threads (network communication, writing changes to disk) aren’t exactly demand for today’s chip either.

I read somewhere that some of the new M3 chips have more bandwidth to RAM or SSD than others, so that’s what I would pay attention.

@MTB_Matt

I don’t think GPU is a major factor as all my photos are taken on my iPhone and editing is very minimal, but wanted to check as that seems to be a big part of how Apple is now differentiating their chips

I agree.