Technology

The best I've found is benchmarks of Apple silicon vs Intel+dGPU, but that's an apples to oranges comparison.

The thing with benchmarks is that they only show you the performance of the type of workload the benchmark is trying to emulate. That’s not very useful in this case. Current PC software is not build with this kind of architecture in mind so it was never designed to take advantage of it. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: since transferring data to/from VRAM is a huge bottleneck, software will be designed to avoid it as much as possible.

For example: a GPU is extremely good at performing an identical operation on lots of data in parallel. The GPU can perform such an operation much, much faster than the CPU. However, copying the data to VRAM and back may add so much additional time that it still takes less time to run it on the CPU, a developer may then choose to run it on the CPU instead even if the GPU was specifically designed to handle that kind of work. On a system with UMA you would absolutely run this on the GPU.

The same thing goes for something like AI accelerators. What PC software exists that takes advantage of such a thing?

A good example of what happens if you design software around this kind of architecture can be found here. This is a post by a developer who worked on Affinity Photo. When they designed this software they anticipated that hardware would move towards a unified memory architecture and designed their software based on that assumption.

When they finally got their hands on UMA hardware in the form of an M1 Max that laptop chip beat the crap out of a $6000 W6900X.

We’re starting to see software taking advantage of these things on macOS, but the PC world still has some catching up to do. The hardware isn’t there yet, and the software always lags behind the hardware.

I've heard about potential benefits, but without something tangible, I'm going to have to assume it's not the main driver here. If the difference is significant, we'd see more servers and workstations running soldered RAM, but AFAIK that's just not a thing.

It’s coming, but Apple is ahead of the game by several years. The problem is that in the PC world no one has a good answer to this yet.

Nvidia makes big, hot, power hungry discrete GPUs. They don’t have an x86 core and Windows on ARM is a joke at this point. I expect them to focus on the server-side with custom high-end AI processors and slowly move out of the desktop space.

AMD has the best papers for desktop. They have a decent x86 core and GPU, they already make APUs. Intel is trying to get into the GPU game but has some catching up to do.

Apple has been quietly working towards this for years. They have their UMA architecture in place, they are starting to put some serious effort into GPU performance and rumor has it that with M4 they will make some big steps in AI acceleration as well. The PC world is held back by a lot of legacy hard and software, but there will be a point where they will have to catch up or be left in the dust.