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"Unified memory" has been around forever in one form or another, as it's simply a single address space (and physical location) for various independent subsystem
by orbital-decay 3y ago
"Unified memory" has been around forever in one form or another, as it's simply a single address space (and physical location) for various independent subsystems. In graphics, it's probably been used since Amiga. (?) This is common in console GPUs which always punched above their weight. The ubiquitous Intel shared memory has been around for ages, although it was not entirely unified (reserved area for GPU, which it cannot escape; zero-copy still possible by allocating inside it and addressing data on CPU).
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoI obviously did not mean "unified memory" in that sense. In that sense even Apple I in 1976 had "unified memory" [1] [2]. The sense in which I meant it, following the spirit of the above paper/thesis, which no one seems to have read because they were too quick to jump on the bashing bandwagon, was unified memory performing "stream computing", e.g. an Apple Silicon chip running a local large language model. And if you get to run Vicuna 13B or something else on an Intel Tiger Lake or similar, more power to you, and to us if you make it open source. [1] "The display section contains its own memory, leaving all of RAM for user programs", http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.1976.102646518.pdf http://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.197... [2] "Running Apple 1 software on a breadboard computer (Wozmon)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlLCtjJzHVI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlLCtjJzHVI
- legosexmagic 3y agointegrated gpus do perform "stream computing" tho