this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
514 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
58458 readers
4512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Don't they also solder it to the motherboard so you can't upgrade your RAM as well?
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.
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.