It’s not that it’s more efficient, it’s simply used less than in conventional PC architecture.
It’s not that you’re wrong from a philosophical perspective with that, it’s that you’re factually incorrect. Memory addresses don’t suddenly shrink or expand depending on where they exist on the bus or the CPU. Being on the SoC doesn’t magically make RAM used less by the OS and applications, as the mach kernel, Darwin, and various MacOS layers still address the same amount of memory as they would on traditional PC architecture.
Memory is memory, just like glass is glass, and glass will still scratch at a level 7 just like 8GB of RAM holds the same amount of information as…8GB of RAM.
The article actually quantitatively tests this too by pointing out their memory usage with Chrome and different numbers of tabs open.
Looks like you didn’t read the article.
You should familiarize yourself with the architecture before commenting. The GPU is broken into several cores of the SoC, along with the roles of the CPU. The UM is not part of the SoC. However, data is passed from what could be referred to as the CPU to what could be referred to as the GPU without interacting with UM.
I’m actually deeply familiar with the architecture, and how caches, memory, and UM’s work. I understand all of that. None of that changes the storage available. Having high memory bandwidth to load/unload memory addresses doesn’t fix the issue of the environment easily exceeding 8GB. I also understand the caching principles and how you actually want RAM utilization to be higher for faster responsiveness. 8GB is still 8GB, and a joke.
Use your experience and analyze Apple’s M SoC before we continue this conversation.