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by throwaway27448 5 days ago
Zero-copy shared memory?
1 comments

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.

Also, if you'd like to know of an earlier example, the very first Raspberry Pi has fully unified memory. Released 2012, SoC from 2011. It's not exposed in the usual APIs which is why you have a configurable RAM allocation for the GPU, so you need to write special code targeting the GPU cores. You can pass a pointer from the CPU and have the GPU read data directly. Results are written back to RAM which can be read by the CPU.
> Unified memory is supported on Linux by all modern AMD GPUs from the Vega series onward

Vega series is 2017.

https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/docs-6.3.0/how-to/...

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.
The M1 isnt particularly good at inference, so pretty much every major current competitor with a 256+ bit unified memory system is better: AMD Strix Halo, NVIDIA DGX Spark, possibly Intel Panther Lake
Sure, but none of these shipped before the M1. That was the first chip I encountered that managed to do something useful without a discrete GPU.
You are missing a major detail: integrated GPUs are crap. They win on efficiency but not on raw compute. Before AI (and crypto too, I guess) people bought GPUs to render graphics and that was their main consumer. People built more and more demanding games that required increasingly powerful GPUs to render well. Gaming systems always had a discrete GPU so there was no reason to scale up integrated GPUs because they wouldn't sell, or they would be a waste of die space.

I don't think the M1 specifically focused on inference. Their goal was to replace Intel/AMD/Nvidia with their own chips, and since the previous Macs shipped discrete GPUs, they had to match or beat those so they don't ship something slower.