AMD is pushing shared, cache-coherent memory between the CPU, GPU, and possibly other co-processors. The major news here is that the GPU sees virtual memory, not physical memory, so accesses to non-present memory will fault in the CPU, allowing the OS to do some interesting tricks to, say, dynamically load textures. This will be a big win for media apps, because sharing data between CPU and GPU will be zero-copy.
The PS4 note at the end of the article is interesting to me. I work for Sony, but have zero visibility into the PlayStation side of the business.
Originally shared by Ars Technica
I am glad to finally see virtual memory making it to hardware assisted stuff. The zedboard fpga can do it to. I look forward to an age where writable hardware can be made by someone other than an EE, and accessed from userspace.