Unified memory

APPLE’S NEW M1 Macs introduce a new kind of Mac processor and a new kind of memory too. Apple calls it Unified Memory Architecture (UMA), and it’s one of the reasons M1 Macs are so incredibly fast.

Since the earliest PCs, the core of the system has been modular. You have a processor at the center, and it sends data to and from system memory and to the graphics card. In recent years, third–party graphics cards have effectively become mini–computers in their own right, with ever faster GPUs and bigger memory, and often price tags to match. For example, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 has 24GB of 19,500MHz GDDR6X