What exactly is UMA?

So I've been looking around to buy laptops and I came across the term UMA? I've read that it stands for Unified Memory Architecture but what exactly does that mean?

I've been looking at the ASUS U46E.

Asus U46E-BAL5 Review & Rating | PCMag.com

ASUS - Laptop / Intel® Core™ i5 Processor / 14" Display / 8GB Memory / 750GB Hard Drive - Platinum - U46E-BAL5

Asus 14" Intel Core i5-2410M Laptop (U46E-HAL5) - Aluminum : 14" Laptops - Future Shop

I'm from Canada so I'm looking to buy that one at Future Shop. So in the pcmag article, it says at the side that it has Intel Graphics HD 3000. However, in the listing on the Best Buy and Future Shop site, it just says UMA. Does that mean the graphics were changed? Or is Intel HD 3000 a form of UMA?

Is UMA just another way of saying integrated?

Hopefully someone can shed a little light on this. I'm not looking to do any gaming at all, but I'd like to know if any videos I watch online will still look fairly good.

 

I guess UMA is just a more fancy word for saying the IGP steals from the system ram.
As long as you get a Sandy Bridge version of the Intel IGP you should not have any problems at all.

 

Yeah, UMA means that instead of having its own memory, the GPU uses the system RAM. It's almost always slower than dedicated VRAM and usually found in integrated or low end GPUs.

 

So could that mean that it still is Intel HD 3000? Would that chipset be considered UMA? Cause if that's what's included, I'm fine with it. But the fact that it just says UMA is throwing me off.

 

All Sandy Bridge notebooks come with the HD 3000.

 

almost all IGPs use system ram.

all it means is that when you buy 4GB of ram for your cpu, you'll only like get to use 3.5GB of it for the cpu. the 500MB is going to be used by the iGPU.

EDIT: numbers are very loose, don't sue me.

 

So I did a little Googling and read that the newer processors have the graphics built in.

Intel® Core? i5-2410M Processor (3M Cache, 2.30 GHz)

According to the page, the i5-2410M has the Intel HD Graphics 3000 but then it says all computing systems might not have it? What's the deal with that? Does that mean the ASUS I mentioned above can't run the graphics chip?

 

Means that some higher end notebooks has the IGP disabled and use a more powerful GPU by AMD or Nvidia.

 

So would you assume UMA means the Intel HD 3000?

 

Like I said. ALL Sandy Bridge processors have HD 3000 built in.

 

what?

UMA just means that it shares some of the system ram.

what is so confusing about that?