It's Unified RAM. So that memory is also used for the GPU & Neural Cores (which is for Apple Intelligence).
This is actually why companies moved away from the unified memory arch decades ago.
It'll be interesting to see as AI continues to advance, if Apple is forced to depart from their unified memory architecture due to growing GPU memory needs.
Today, the industry is moving toward unified memory. This trend includes not only Apple but also Intel, AMD with their APUs, and Qualcomm. Pretty much everyone.
To me, the benefits are clear:
- Reduced copying of large amounts of data between memory pools.
- Improved memory usage.
- Generally lower power consumption.
I don't understand - wouldn't the OS be able to do a better job of dynamically allocating memory between say GPU and CPU in real time based on instantaneous need as opposed to the buyer doing it one time while purchasing their machine? Apparently not, but I'm not sure what I'm missing.
The usual reasoning that people give for it being bad is: you share memory bandwidth between CPU and GPU, and many things are starved for memory access.
Apple’s approach is to stack the memory dies on top of the processor dies and connect them with a stupid-wide bus so that everything has enough bandwidth.
And besides, what Apple is doing is placing the RAM really close to the SoC, I think they are on the same package even, that was not the case on the PC either AFAIK?