All very impressive, but here's my question: what are they going to do about graphics cards? Will they find a way to connect existing graphics cards to their CPU? Will they make their own ARM-based graphics cards? Will AMD or Nvidia?
Support for one of the recent Radeons was recently added to macOS, so it's a possibility. No reason the M1 can't do PCIe, as far as I know the only thing keeping eGPUs from working on the M1 right now is software support. It could also be that the driver was added because of the extensibility of the Pro, though.
My expectation is that they'll keep the GPU on the same level, which is "good enough for most users", and focus on hardware acceleration for tasks like video and audio encoding and decoding instead. With an ML chip and fast audiovisual processing, most consumers don't need a beefy GPU at all, as long as you stick to Apple's proprietary standards. Seems like a win-win for Apple if they don't add in an external GPU.
Yeah I imagine the Radeon support was for the Pro and the existing Intel Macs (though I don’t know if those Radeon GPUs are really supported via eGPU. Are there enclosures where they fit?)
Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use?
It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane (and maybe Redshift and other GPU accelerated 3D renderers) to support Metal (to the point where it sounds like there may have been Apple Metal engineers basically working at Otoy to help develop Octane for Metal) and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see eGPU support announced for ARM Macs at WWDC (and maybe even the iPad Pros that support Thunderbolt. Yeah the idea of plugging your iPad into an eGPU enclosure is funny, but if it’s not to hard to implement, why not?)
>It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane to support Metal...and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs.
At the start there will still be a lot more Mac Pros running AMD hardware that must be supported.
It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1]
This new Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just _six months_ prior to the Apple Silicon announcement.
So, unless Apple simultaneously was trying to honor pro users while also laying plans to abandon them, it is hard to imagine that Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware. Keep in mind, the company had just gotten through a major failure with the Gen 2 cylindrical Mac Pro design.
The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2]
While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for.
There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019.
Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3]
It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon.
So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations.
I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56.
While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4]
Apple designed and released custom hardware that used a new slot to accelerate compute. My point is that this illustrates Afterburner as a product shows clear direction for Apple to put Apple Silicon into discrete graphics or other acceleration compute in the Mac Pro.
> Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use?
What do mac users need a beefy gpu for?
AFAICT apple just need a GPU that's good enough for most users not to complain, integrated Intel-GPU style.
I don't think Apple cares much for those people, they can buy the Mac Pro or a PC if they really need the GPU power.
eGPUs can be a nice addition, but I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system. You're already limited to AMD GPUs after the clusterfuck of a fight Apple and Nvidia had, and I doubt Intel's Xe lineup will receive much love for Apple right after the Intel CPUs have been cut from Apple's products.
Honestly, for the kind of work that does need an arbitrary amount of GPU horsepower, you're barking at the wrong tree if you buy Apple. Get yourself a Macbook and a console or game streaming service if you want to play video games, and get yourself a workstation if you want to do CAD work.
I don't think the work Apple would need to put into a GPU solution would be worth it, financially speaking.
How would you fit Apple's AR/VR ambitions into this perspective? (I.e., given AR/VR has steeper GPU requirements, both on the consumption and creation side.)
Well unless Apple can pull an M1 and do with their GPUs what they did with their CPUs and start to embarrass Nvidia and AMD with lower power, higher performance GPUs.
To make a Mac Pro-scale system with real gains, they would roughly need the equal of 9x the number of performance cores of an M1 (~36 to 48 cores), if they were to scale GPU in the same way (72 core GPU) you are looking at a 72 core GPU with over 23 TFlops (FP32), they could also find room in clock speeds and 5nm+ to get an additional 10 out of it I imagine. In general that would be enough for many but I wouldn't be too surprised to see them do something more exotic with their own GPU.
A Surface Book 3 with an intel processor and an outdated Nvidia 1650 TI laps around M1 in games. Almost 2x performance. I'm not even going to compare it to laptops with modern GPUs.
> no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway.
True, but previous macs were never really competitive with PC alternatives on the hardware side, since they all used the same chips just with a higher price tag. With M1, that's starting to change, and Apple has the opportunity to attract a much large customer base for Mac than it ever has.
And of course, they're much more interested in gaming nowadays thanks to iOS. Maybe not interested enough to suck up their pride and apologize to Nvidia for giving them the finger, but probably enough to at least stick a beefier GPU into macs.
Even putting aside the performance issue, Apple and gaming have never worked together quite well.
Apple's modus operandi of quickly and frequently deprecating old architectures and requiring app developers to constantly keep up goes down very badly with the traditional video game development model - of spending time and budget finishing up one game, releasing a few patches, then moving on to the next game with little further upkeep or maintenance of the now-done game. (Yes, games as a service is more common nowadays, but a huge number of games still go by this old model.) This model relies on long-term compatibility of old binaries on the platform being pretty stable, which is fairly true for consoles and Windows, but Apple platforms are anything but.
There are massive piles upon piles of only slightly old games that are not just unsupported but simply refuse to run on both the iOS App Store and Steam for Mac (including Valve's own back catalog!), due to the abandonment of 32-bit binary support a few versions back. And even if the developer is willing to do bare minimum upkeep work to recompile an old game and make it run on current hardware, chances are that between the time of release and now, lots of new mandatory hoops (eg. natively support a certain screen size) have been added to the app store checklist so that passing store certification requires tons more work than a simple recompile, further deterring the dev.
Perhaps you could chalk it up to the dev being lazy for not doing regular maintenance of the game, but the rest of the game industry doesn't force you to do that, while only Apple does.
