this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Lol, the ram is part of the m3 chip That’s a reason why it is so efficient. The storage in m3 is for RAM and videoRAM.
Wikipedia: The M3's Unified Memory Architecture features up to 24 GB RAM, the M3 Pro up to 36 GB, and the M3 Max up to 128 GB. Like the M2 generation, the M3 SoCs use 6,400 MT/s LPDDR5 SDRAM. As with prior M series SoCs, this serves as both RAM and video RAM.
That's literally how Intel integrated GPUs work too
The RAM being shared with the GPU, that is.
Yea but the RAM is not on the located within the chip design, is it?
With Apple's chips the RAM is all on the CPU die so both CPU and GPU get the performance benefit. With Intel's, none of it is.
"What Apple calls “unified memory” is RAM (random-access memory) used as “main memory” (not a CPU or GPU cache and not mass storage either).
The term “unified” refers to the fact that the memory is shared by the CPU cores and the GPU cores. That’s not novel: “integrated graphics” options in Intel x86 chips (like Iris Xe) do the same, as do just about all modern smartphones."
I'm not talking about the merits or otherwise of "unified memory", I'm pointing out that because Apple's RAM is physically integrated into the CPU, it can provide more memory bandwidth than regular DDR5 DIMMs.