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I 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 mem
by ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
I 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.