I am always a bit baffled why Apple gets credited with this. Unified memory has been a thing for decades. I can still load the biggest models on my 10th gen Intel Core CPU and the integrated GPU can run inference.
The difference being that modern integrated GPU are just that much faster and can run inference at tolerable speeds.
(Plus NPUs being a thing now, but that also started much earlier. Thr 10th gen Intel Core architecture already had instructions to deal with "AI" workloads... just very preliminary)
That’s shared, not unified, it’s partitioned where cpu and gpu copies are managed by driver. Lunar lake (2024) is getting closer but still not as tightly integrated as apple and capped to 32GB only (Apple has up to 512GB). AMD ryzen ai max is closer to Apple but still 3 times slower memory.