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> The Unified Memory pool is the “game changer” M1 knocking from 2020. Gamed changed, past tense, six years ago. This is catch-up.
by testing22321 4mo ago
> The Unified Memory pool is the “game changer”
M1 knocking from 2020.
Gamed changed, past tense, six years ago.
This is catch-up.
- bombcar 4mo agoI want unified but not uniform - everything can address anything, but you can add slower RAM to the system without requiring an entirely new chip. NUMA is cool.
- jandrese 4mo agoHell, SGI O2s from 1996 had this. For all of the hype the performance gains were pretty modest.
- wmf 4mo agoUMA was never about performance and it still isn't. Spark is slower than a 5090.
- JMiao 4mo agodid they learn why? were there other gains?
- p_l 4mo agoO2 GPU was slower than other SGI options at the time, however it could use hilariously larger pool of memory without copying, which meant that O2 could use approaches that were punishingly hard (very tight transfer loops) or impossible (huge textures that couldn't be virtualized due to needing whole texture). That was because unlike other GPUs at the time, O2's didn't have dedicated memory but shared the memory with CPU - way slower, but zero copies and bigger. Arguably early home computers and workstations also used "unified memory" :D
- zdw 4mo agoFWIW, the O2's UMA let it handle far more textures than almost any other contemporary system with reasonable performance. Most other SGIs had single or low double-digit megabytes of texture memory, whereas the O2 could host one gigabyte of unified memory and use a huge chunk of that for textures.
- Rohansi 4mo agoFYI it existed long before that. Shared memory between CPU and iGPU has been a thing for a long time.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoZero-copy shared memory?
- zokier 4mo agoyes, here is 2013 AMD presentation of the topic as example: https://events.csdn.net/AMD/GPUSat%20-%20hUMA_june-public.pdf https://events.csdn.net/AMD/GPUSat%20-%20hUMA_june-public.pd... see slide 14 especially
- throwaway27448 4mo agoAh. Well, what kind of consumer hardware/software combo could I purchase to use this? outside of perhaps the... PS4?
- Rohansi 4mo agoEverything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days. If you're asking for something closer to the RTX Spark or Apple Silicon then look at AMD's Strix Halo systems.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago> Everything that doesn't have a discrete GPU has unified memory these days. Sorry, I meant before the M1 came out. And you and I both know that "unified memory" doesn't refer to allocating ram to the gpu for zero-swap sharing.
- Rohansi 4mo ago> Unified memory is supported on Linux by all modern AMD GPUs from the Vega series onward Vega series is 2017. https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/docs-6.3.0/how-to/hip_runtime_api/memory_management/unified_memory.html#system-requirements https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/HIP/en/docs-6.3.0/how-to/...
- zokier 4mo agoAMD Fusion knocking from 2010.