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>Unified memory foreseen 16 years before Apple Silicon. Honestly, it's good to get some more background information before claiming that Apple invented every i
by ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Unified memory foreseen 16 years before Apple Silicon.
Honestly, it's good to get some more background information before claiming that Apple invented every innovation till sliced bread.
Microcontrollers, SoCs from various vendors, gaming consoles and Intel CPUs with integrated graphics also had unified memory since .. forever(?), or at least nearly 30 years, because it was as efficient back then as it is now for silicone and SW usage.
Apple didn't reinvent the wheel in this regard, it was already there as a low hanging fruit.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoI did not say Apple invented unified memory, just that Ian Buck's prediction was 16 years before Apple Silicon. Also, in practice, is not only about unified memory, but also performance. The Intel chip with integrated graphics is able to boil an egg with the heat it dissipates, the M1/M2 are cool as if not even running while handling way more workload.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoHaving unified memory and having much more compute performance/watt are two orthogonal issues. Unfired memory had already existed before Apple silicone and was already present in most consoles, cheap tablets and smartphones due to how ubiquos SoCs and Intel chips with iGPUs were.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoIan Buck's thesis is about how GPUs can be used as "stream computing": "In this paper (Buck, 2004), we present Brook for GPUs, a system for general-purpose computation on programmable graphics hardware. Brook extends C to include simple data-parallel constructs, enabling the use of the GPU as a streaming co-processor." That's all the point: Apple Silicon allows for running local large language models (and other ML models/algorithms) in a way, at a price point, with enough performance, and so on in which other chips with unified memory don't.