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by testing22321 5 days ago
> The Unified Memory pool is the “game changer”

M1 knocking from 2020.

Gamed changed, past tense, six years ago. This is catch-up.

4 comments

Hell, SGI O2s from 1996 had this. For all of the hype the performance gains were pretty modest.
FWIW, the O2's UMA let it handle far more textures than almost any other contemporary system with reasonable performance.

Most other SGIs had single or low double-digit megabytes of texture memory, whereas the O2 could host one gigabyte of unified memory and use a huge chunk of that for textures.

UMA was never about performance and it still isn't. Spark is slower than a 5090.
did they learn why? were there other gains?
O2 GPU was slower than other SGI options at the time, however it could use hilariously larger pool of memory without copying, which meant that O2 could use approaches that were punishingly hard (very tight transfer loops) or impossible (huge textures that couldn't be virtualized due to needing whole texture).

That was because unlike other GPUs at the time, O2's didn't have dedicated memory but shared the memory with CPU - way slower, but zero copies and bigger.

Arguably early home computers and workstations also used "unified memory" :D

FYI it existed long before that. Shared memory between CPU and iGPU has been a thing for a long time.
Zero-copy shared memory?
yes, here is 2013 AMD presentation of the topic as example: https://events.csdn.net/AMD/GPUSat%20-%20hUMA_june-public.pd... see slide 14 especially
Ah. Well, what kind of consumer hardware/software combo could I purchase to use this? outside of perhaps the... PS4?
Everything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days. If you're asking for something closer to the RTX Spark or Apple Silicon then look at AMD's Strix Halo systems.
> Everything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days.

Sorry, I meant before the M1 came out. And you and I both know that "unified memory" doesn't refer to allocating ram to the gpu for zero-swap sharing.

Every AMD APU since introduction of HSA did it, which is how AMD ended up doing SoCs for PS4, PS5, and Xbox
Ok, so which one of these contemporary or previous chipsets could compete with the M1 for inference? Perhaps I'm missing some major detail.
I want unified but not uniform - everything can address anything, but you can add slower RAM to the system without requiring an entirely new chip. NUMA is cool.
AMD Fusion knocking from 2010.