Shared memory is different to unified memory, AMD’s got an implementation of the later with their “Ryzen AI MAX+” (ugh) systems, does quite well in benchmarks.
It also doesn’t hurt that Apple puts the RAM on the SoC and gives it a truckload of bandwidth. DDR5 is about 70GB/s, meanwhile the M4 Max is around 540GB/s.
I didn’t know AMD had managed to switch over to unified memory too. Managing that while remaining x86 compatible is quite an achievement!
I think the next big thing will be when storage becomes as fast as ram and they unify that too, getting rid of separate RAM. Working with data directly in place could have massive efficiency boosts. But the industry has been trying to get it that fast for many years and still not succeeded. And once they do, separate SSDs wouldn’t be possible, at least not as a primary storage, so it wont be an advance that makes sense for every use case.
Shared memory is different to unified memory, AMD’s got an implementation of the later with their “Ryzen AI MAX+” (ugh) systems, does quite well in benchmarks.
It also doesn’t hurt that Apple puts the RAM on the SoC and gives it a truckload of bandwidth. DDR5 is about 70GB/s, meanwhile the M4 Max is around 540GB/s.
I didn’t know AMD had managed to switch over to unified memory too. Managing that while remaining x86 compatible is quite an achievement!
I think the next big thing will be when storage becomes as fast as ram and they unify that too, getting rid of separate RAM. Working with data directly in place could have massive efficiency boosts. But the industry has been trying to get it that fast for many years and still not succeeded. And once they do, separate SSDs wouldn’t be possible, at least not as a primary storage, so it wont be an advance that makes sense for every use case.