Yes, but it's a double edged sword. It means you're using relatively slow ram for the GPU, and that the GPU takes memory bandwidth away from the CPU as well. Traditionally we've ended up with something that looks like Intel's kinda crappy integrated video.

The copying process was never that much of a big deal, but paying for 8GB of graphics ram really is.

> The copying process was never that much of a big deal

I don't know about that? Texture memory management in games can be quite painful. You have to consider different hardware setups and being able to keep the textures you need for a certain scene in memory (or not, in which case, texture thrashing).

The copying process was quite a barrier to using compute (general purpose GPU) to augment CPU processing and you had to ensure that the work farmed to the GPU was worth the cost of the to/from costs. Game consoles of late have generally had unified memory (UMA) and it's quite a nice advantage because moving data is a significant bottleneck.

Using Intel's integrated video as a way to assess the benefits of unified memory is off target. Intel had a multitude of design goals for their integrated GPU and UMA was only one aspect so it's not so easy to single that out for any shortcomings that you seem to be alluding to.

If you're looking at the SKU with the high GPU core count and 64 Gigs of LPDDR5, the total memory bandwidth (400 GBps) isn't that far off from the bandwidth a discrete GPU would have to it's local pool of memory.

You also have an (estimated from die shots) 64 megabyte SRAM system level cache and large L2 and L1 CPU caches, but you are indeed sharing the memory bandwidth between the CPU and GPU.

I'm looking forward to these getting into the hands of testers.