This is a relatively paltry amount by today’s standards: the 2019 MacBook Pro I’m writing this article on, for instance, has 32GB of RAM and 4GB of memory devoted to the graphics chip. Unified memory might sound like a backwards step, especially as Apple ships even its latest iMac with only 8GB of unified memory. Unified memory does away with those two discrete pools of memory and combines them into one, hence the name. This was separate from the main system memory (or RAM). In the past, the graphics chips – the component that is predominantly used to power games – would have come with its own physical allocation of memory. Now, instead of the insides of your computer being lots of separate components (an Intel processor, an Nvidia graphics chip, say) that are attached to a motherboard, the latest Apple Macs are what’s known as a system-on-a-chip (SoC), where the processor, the graphics chip and the memory are all part of the same package.
Unified memory is found on systems that use Apple’s own processors, the first iteration of which are called M1.
What is unified memory, you might be wondering, and is it better or worse than good old RAM? Let us explain. If you’ve bought a Mac recently, or are considering buying one, you may have noticed that Apple sells computers with what’s called ‘unified memory’ instead of the traditional random access memory (RAM).
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