Hell, SGI O2s from 1996 had this. For all of the hype the performance gains were pretty modest.
replyFWIW, the O2's UMA let it handle far more textures than almost any other contemporary system with reasonable performance.
replyMost 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.
UMA was never about performance and it still isn't. Spark is slower than a 5090.
replydid they learn why? were there other gains?
replyI 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.
replyFYI it existed long before that. Shared memory between CPU and iGPU has been a thing for a long time.
replyZero-copy shared memory?
replyyes, here is 2013 AMD presentation of the topic as example: https://events.csdn.net/AMD/GPUSat%20-%20hUMA_june-public.pd... see slide 14 especially
replyAMD Fusion knocking from 2010.
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