The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more integer units” or something along those lines, and thinking, uh, isn’t that a good thing?
replyThere's a qualitative difference between "they're doing a different thing" and "they're doing the same thing, tuned differently". GP is saying that this is a case of "they just tuned it differently".
replyThis distinction doesn't change what the performance numbers look like today, but it does inform what changes would be necessary for those numbers to look different tomorrow. E.g. Apple Silicon isn't fundamentally orders of magnitude more efficient than x86, they just used smaller features. Newer Intel and AMD chips made on equivalent processes _also_ get similar efficiency gains.
Depends on the expense trade off.
replyIf I get 10% more performance for 50% more cost it really depends on one's needs, for example.
I am just saying it's not magic and x86 is capable of doing the same. Quad channel memory used to be more common in consumer hardware but now it looks like you don't even have the option anymore for desktops. AMD's Strix Halo was the first sign to reversing that (it has quad channel memory!) and hopefully we see more of that in the future.
replyAMD does market segmentation and limits consumer chips to dual-channel. You need to cough up the dough and get Threadripper for quad-channel. Or even more for Threadripper Pro to get octa-channel.
replyAfaik steam deck is quad channel, despite it being a pretty low end chip (with a decent GPU though)
replyAs I mentioned above AMD's Strix Halo has quad channel memory and is consumer level. But yes, other than that everything is segmented away.
replyThe memory bandwidth is a small thing compared to the massive win you get by not having to move data between two memory pools at all.
replyOften you don't move memory around as a programmer, but that's exactly what happens in the background.
replyIt's the address space that's unified, not always the physical hardware.
The data movement (when needed) is handled transparently in the background by page faults and other tricks.
Depends on your workload. And AMD has supported unified memory long before Apple Silicon existed anyway.
replyExcept strix halo.
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