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Apple may already be headed in that direction. They already have unified CPU and GPU RAM. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that they could unify persistent storage and memory.

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Knowing apple’s marketing moves, they could definitely do that: just use a single number to describe memory. And then pretend it’s a big number.

I can already see it: base 128GB of total system unified memory for your files and data.

Keep all other files in iCloud for big money. Genius

Well technically, Intel and AMD both use the regular system RAM for their integrated graphics VRAM, but I see what you mean.

Intel and AMD also do support unified memory for their integrated graphics. It’s been a while since you needed a statically cordoned-off area of main memory (“shared memory”) for the iGPU to work.

Consoles have been using unified memory since the 8th gen (PS4/XB1/Switch, kinda sorta even WiiU).

And NVidia has CUDA unified-memory slide decks going back at least 5 years.

The Xbox360 already had unified memory too. That gave it a slight edge compared to the PS3 in the long term because it was more flexible compared to a fixed 50:50 split.

The original xbox before it too.

And the N64 before them. I think it was the first console with unified memory.

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