Seems to me, off chip RAM becomes a new sort of cache.
If Apple sizes the on chip RAM large enough for most tasks to fly, bigger system RAM can get paged in and performance overall would be great, until a user requires concurrent performance exceeding on chip RAM.
The thing I worry about is that the whole appeal of the Mac Pro is upgradeability — you can replace components over time. So integrated RAM would be problematic since that's a component people definitely like to upgrade.
But with your idea... I dunno, if they could pull that off that would be super cool!
Yeah I think so too. If they can execute from off chip Ram, perhaps with a wait state or whatever it takes, for a ton of use cases no one will even notice.
It will all just effectively be large RAM.
Doing that coupled with a fast SSD, and people could be doing seriously large data work on relatively modest machines in terms of size and such.
A very simple division could be compute bound code ends up being on chip RAM, I/O bound code of any kind ends up in big RAM, off chip.
If Apple sizes the on chip RAM large enough for most tasks to fly, bigger system RAM can get paged in and performance overall would be great, until a user requires concurrent performance exceeding on chip RAM.