Not specific between ARM and Intel, but there actually is which you do mention. Since it is unified memory, the GPU has the ability to access ANY of the 8GB or 16GB. Therefore, you do not need to "copy" data for integrated Intel graphics like before. Thus resulting in less RAM usage in this scenario. So instead of taking up 2x the memory for the graphics tasks, its only 1x.There was never a viable reason why the M1 would use substantially less RAM than Intel