4 ms·

The whole focus on this makes no sense to me as well. UMA has been standard architecture for mobile SoCs since the dawn of time(aside from a few oddballs). Ditt

The whole focus on this makes no sense to me as well. UMA has been standard architecture for mobile SoCs since the dawn of time(aside from a few oddballs). Ditto tiling GPUs and the few other things I've seen called out. Heck the XBox 360 used UMA[1] and the PS3 didn't[2]. It really didn't play into the systems performance directly(other than you might do some crazy tricks like store audio data in VRAM and stream it back). With UMA you can get into cases where heavy CPU reads can impact other parts of the system because the memory controller is shared. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specifications#Memory_and_system_bandwidth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specificati... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications#Central_processing_unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specif...

kllrnohj 6y ago
I've seen a few very rare edge cases where you can do cool tricks with UMA on mobile (which as you say have been UMA for years). For example on Android for VR you can have the sensor data stored in a chunk of memory that can also be read by the GPU, so your last-second time warp can have that smidge less latency by sampling the latest sensor data as hot off the sensor as it gets, without even bouncing off of the CPU. ( https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/sensor#asensormanager_createhardwarebufferdirectchannel https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/group/sensor#ase... ) But the best VR experiences are still done on non-UMA desktop PCs with discrete graphics so... At some point the slight efficiency wins of UMA are trumped by just the raw horsepower you get from multiple big dies.