It's a shame IMO that AMD won't ship desktop APUs with a large GPU and GDDR6. They're willing to sell the tech to MS, Sony, and some random Chinese company, but not to consumers.
Their current APUs aren’t bad for casual gamers doing budget builds. Scaling them up significantly would require larger power supplies, bigger heatsinks, and other expenses. By the time an actual gamer is going through the trouble of building such a system, they’re likely to just buy an entry-level GPU so their CPU and GPU don’t have to be upgraded together.
But GPUs are so rare that a modern mid-level costs $1000 and my 1080Ti is currently worth double what I paid for it three years ago. I think a good APU would be very welcome in this hellscape.
I think a more realistic reason is AMD doesn't want to cannibalise its GPU sales.
Edit: thanks for the quick answer!
Edit 2: regarding this company, it's actually not called zhongshan. The company is called "小霸王” or little master. A acclaimed early gaming console and amateur pc manufacturer. They coped the original FC and pirated a lot of the games. But because gaming console was banned in China (the ban was lifted Google to see details), the console was labeled tutoring console. I learned basic on them. This project with Amd supposes to be reviving the gaming console after the ban was lifted. But the project is now officially dead, according to report https://3g.163.com/tech/article/EF1RBUIS00097U7T.html?spss=a...
It'd probably have to be kind of a VM in a 'game', to avoid revamping the outer OS. They'd probably want to nerf the GPU in Windows to reduce folks' temptation to use it to route around the XBox store (for graphically intense games at least), and maybe price Windows to make up for decreased game revenue per console. Even given all that it might let folks with XBoxes cheaply "get a PC" of sorts, and so come a bit closer to the rest of MS's world.
Probably technical, business, and other issues with that, but again, I did say fun idea that won't happen.
The M1 Mac is one of the few laptops that actually does have fully unified memory.
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows...
And zero copy buffers and unified address space are totally a thing on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia(Tegra) igpus. Sounds like there's more than a bit of "Apple Magic" in that blog post.
Considering the fact that most of AMD's CPUs do not include an iGPU, I don't really get why they haven't launched something like that for the workstation market.
The nvidia equivalent would be something like the Quadro P400.
Of course, pricing, even on these cards, is a bit crazy right now.
My biggest annoyance with switching to AMD has been this. My previous Intel system has a Core i7 4790K, Intel's top tier CPU for their consumer platform at the time, and it had an iGPU.
It was not an amazing iGPU by any means, but it was more than enough to support two additional monitors "for free" which was wonderful while nVidia had a bug preventing the GPU from going in to low power mode in certain multi-monitor configurations. It also meant I had plenty of ports to support three monitors, a VR headset, a TV, and have some space left over.
When I upgraded to a Ryzen 9 3900X I tripled my core count and gained a fair amount of per-core performance, but I lost those extra ports. Now my graphics card is maxed out and I have to switch the HDMI cable between the TV and the VR headset.
They've slowly been moving the G models up the lineup, but it's still not possible to get a truly high-end CPU from AMD with an iGPU. It would be really nice, especially these days with standalone GPUs being unobtanium.
The other option is AMD motherboard manufacturers start shipping boards with the E9260 or something onboard.