1) The Apple Silicon Macs don't have Thunderbolt 3 ports. They have USB 4 ports.
2) And, I'm sure the product page for the Blackmagic hasn't been touched in ages.
3) Apple has removed the Blackmagic eGPU from the MacBook Air's compatible accessories, as the article says.
1) Apple spec page specifies "Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports" -> there is Thunderbolt. 2) The Black Magic product page has had its compatibility list updated. 3) see 2.
Believe what you want. There is no eGPU support on M1 Macs, full stop, and we have multiple sources inside Apple saying so.
Buy one for a M1 Mac at your own peril. You can't say that you weren't warned.
***Wow... minutes after I posted the below screenshot from Apple’s Blackmagic page, I refreshed the page and the M1 models were gone! That ends that.
Near the bottom of the page, click on the “+” next to “Compatibility”. The list of compatible macs are listed, including all the M1 models. That was explicitly added. Further to that, USB 4 specs indicate Thunderbolt compatibility can be support - hence Apple labeling the port “Thunderport/USB 4” - so it is technically possible.
While Apple was touting the improved graphical capability of the new Apple Silicon Macs, they neglected to mention during the event that the M1 chip does not support eGPU technologies.
I read that page you cite, there is no mention of M1 at all. It does say "Compatible with Mac with Thunderbolt 3 ports" but that's probably out of date now. Apple needs to update several things on its website now.
I'm dumbstruck that ALL of the M1 Macs have a maximum of 16 Gb of RAM - even the MacBook Pro! It appears that it is all in the Unified Memory of the M1 chip. How is this a good idea?
This is another thing that makes me think this is essentially a rehashed iPhone 12 CPU. iPhones use PoP (package on package) for the RAM, and more than 16GB physically won't fit. Therefore the CPU package would have to change to add extra pins for things like external memory and actual PCIe (not Thunderbolt), and that might have been too much work to get done for this event.
Technically Thunderbolt and USB4 must have PCIe lanes assigned maybe Apple is going out of spec in this one or maybe Rosetta 2 emulated GPU drivers don’t work and need AMD to port it’s drivers to ARM so maybe Apple will give support eventually to eGPUs Or maybe they are stupid I really really hope at least in this regard is not the last one aaand I also really hope that in te future (even though now they’ve said no) they work with Microsoft to revive BootCamp with Windows 10 ARM and my last hope is that Microsoft now levels up its x86 emulation layer or as they call it “magical emulation” to at least match Rosetta 2, they need almost 2 years to give support for x86 64 bits apps and have serious issues with graphic APIs still, while Apple in his first attempt was able to run at playable framerates non other than Shadow Of the Tomb Raider x86 in an iPad SoC
I'm dumbstruck that ALL of the M1 Macs have a maximum of 16 Gb of RAM - even the MacBook Pro! It appears that it is all in the Unified Memory of the M1 chip. How is this a good idea?
This is another thing that makes me think this is essentially a rehashed iPhone 12 CPU. iPhones use PoP (package on package) for the RAM, and more than 16GB physically won't fit. Therefore the CPU package would have to change to add extra pins for things like external memory and actual PCIe (not Thunderbolt), and that might have been too much work to get done for this event.
Technically Thunderbolt and USB4 must have PCIe lanes assigned maybe Apple is going out of spec in this one or maybe Rosetta 2 emulated GPU drivers don’t work and need AMD to port it’s drivers to ARM so maybe Apple will give support eventually to eGPUs Or maybe they are stupid I really really hope at least in this regard is not the last one aaand I also really hope that in te future (even though now they’ve said no) they work with Microsoft to revive BootCamp with Windows 10 ARM and my last hope is that Microsoft now levels up its x86 emulation layer or as they call it “magical emulation” to at least match Rosetta 2, they need almost 2 years to give support for x86 64 bits apps and have serious issues with graphic APIs still, while Apple in his first attempt was able to run at playable framerates non other than Shadow Of the Tomb Raider x86 in an iPad SoC
Hmm, I guess this isn’t a surprise, but it is interesting all the Macs that don’t support discrete GPUs were the ones updated today, implying in the future they will either introduce a chip with a much better GPU or otherwise are still trying to work with AMD to maintain their graphics options in later models.
No one is buying a Mac mini, iPad Air, or 13" MacBook Pro for the GPU power. These are entry level machines for the average person.
Much ado about nothing as always.
We are discussing the capability and speed of the GPU versus the Intel Macs and Apple's M1, as to whether it really is much faster than the Intel ones. People might have liked to use a 13" Macbook with an eGPU for power, but now they can't, so the discussion is quite relevant. Whilst you might not care, many people don't see that as "much ado about nothing".
You’re right. I’m sure all 10 of those people are going to be extremely upset at this news, @crowley being one of them.
Give Apple time. This is round 1 of the M1 and Apple did a lot to improve the compute experience of probably 90% of their customer base. Apple goes with what’s ready at the time when they are ready to launch. They could have waited a year to make the switch to Core 2 Duo’s when they made the switch but they didn’t.
Why would anyone care about eGPUs on low end laptops -- really.
If you have really serious need for horsepower, you don't buy low end products designed for low end use.
It's like I own a Prius. It can't pull a teardrop trailer. For that I use my Sienna van. And if I wanted to pull something much bigger I'd invest in a Ford F150 or F350.
Why would anyone care about eGPUs on low end laptops -- really.
If you have really serious need for horsepower, you don't buy low end products designed for low end use.
It's like I own a Prius. It can't pull a teardrop trailer. For that I use my Sienna van. And if I wanted to pull something much bigger I'd invest in a Ford F150 or F350.
It's like that.
If you could plug in something relatively inexpensive that means your Prius can pull a teardrop trailer then you don't need to buy a Sienna van. Pretty simple.
Why would anyone care about eGPUs on low end laptops -- really.
If you have really serious need for horsepower, you don't buy low end products designed for low end use.
It's like I own a Prius. It can't pull a teardrop trailer. For that I use my Sienna van. And if I wanted to pull something much bigger I'd invest in a Ford F150 or F350.
It's like that.
If you could plug in something relatively inexpensive that means your Prius can pull a teardrop trailer then you don't need to buy a Sienna van. Pretty simple.
But, physics is real. So in money. The IF's are what makes for science fiction.
I’m not remotely surprised that eGPUs are not supported. Does anyone here think eGPUs (and the way they’ve been working so far) was ever an “Apple-like” thing?
As others have said, this is Apple’s first foray into selling machines with their own CPU/GPU. Not only do Apple NOT target desktop-class performance with these, they don’t target high end gaming with them. They don’t target high-end gaming at all (which is why I’m likely to be buying a gaming PC while I sit around waiting to see which Mac I might buy for the rest of what I do with computers).
I’m surprised they even *mentioned* game engines, but I assume Unity is present in iOS development. These machines are fine for that, no? That’s what this serves: low-to-medium-end users and developers for their bigger-selling platform. The small RAM and small screen makes the first one of no interest to me, despite longing for a new portable with retina. More likely, I’ll end up with some future iMac, because I can’t afford buying multiple things and I already need to spend money on a second computer just for a gaming hobby.
As soon as I saw their original announcement of changing CPU, I knew this was going to be another big game of wait-and-see. I’m expecting dropped support for LOTS of things. The last two times the architecture changed, a lot of software was dropped, as was a lot of hardware via drivers and the companies who made the hardware not wanting to work on “obsolete” products.
This will be painful for some people and I’m waiting it out yet again. I only have so much money to spend, one time. I’m glad this much has already been released. That means the process might move along faster than I feared...
Maybe it was just an embarrassment to Apple to support external GPUs that had slower speeds than their internal one.
Integrated Graphics are fine for the average consumer surfing websites, etc. But discrete graphics have always crushed them and likely always will. I do wonder what reason they could have to remove support for External GPU's? I suppose it doesn't matter for something like the MacBook Air, I doubt many if any people used one on that machine anyway, but they need to offer this for their real "Pro" machines.
It's not really fair to say Apple "removed support for eGPUs on Apple Silicon Macs" since Apple never supported eGPUs on Apple Silicon Macs. Nobody has lost anything. It's entirely possible that this feature will be added later. In fact, we're fairly confident other GPU support will be added, if only for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
"We're fairly confident"?
Who is "we", are you quoting from another source?
Fair point, good catch, I worded it poorly. What I should have said was "not a single commenter on these threads have ever said that Apple Silicon Mac Pros in the future will not support any other GPU other than Apple GPUs." That's what I meant. Can you cite anyone who has said otherwise?
Why would anyone care about eGPUs on low end laptops -- really.
If you have really serious need for horsepower, you don't buy low end products designed for low end use.
It's like I own a Prius. It can't pull a teardrop trailer. For that I use my Sienna van. And if I wanted to pull something much bigger I'd invest in a Ford F150 or F350.
It's like that.
If you could plug in something relatively inexpensive that means your Prius can pull a teardrop trailer then you don't need to buy a Sienna van. Pretty simple.
But, physics is real. So in money. The IF's are what makes for science fiction.
Are you saying that eGPUs are science fiction? They're not, I've got one, and I like it a lot.
I'm completely lost on what point you're trying to make.
Hmm, I guess this isn’t a surprise, but it is interesting all the Macs that don’t support discrete GPUs were the ones updated today, implying in the future they will either introduce a chip with a much better GPU or otherwise are still trying to work with AMD to maintain their graphics options in later models.
No one is buying a Mac mini, iPad Air, or 13" MacBook Pro for the GPU power. These are entry level machines for the average person.
Much ado about nothing as always.
We are discussing the capability and speed of the GPU versus the Intel Macs and Apple's M1, as to whether it really is much faster than the Intel ones. People might have liked to use a 13" Macbook with an eGPU for power, but now they can't, so the discussion is quite relevant. Whilst you might not care, many people don't see that as "much ado about nothing".
You’re right. I’m sure all 10 of those people are going to be extremely upset at this news, @crowley being one of them.
Huh? I'm not extremely upset, I'm not even that surprised. I was unlikely to buy a first generation machine with the new silicon anyway, this just gave me another reason to hold off. I hope Apple put this functionality back, and if they don't in the next couple of years, I may consider going elsewhere. That's all.
The lack of support for eGPUs is probably a driver problem. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that much of AMDs drivers are written at a very low level. Porting to the M1 might be pretty daunting. That doesn't mean that AMD won't do it but it could take a while.
I would never buy hardware on a maybe they'll fix it later basis but I wouldn't completely lose hope either. At some point Apple has to replace the Mac Pro. Are they going to create 100+ W graphics cards for the Mac Pro? That seems unlikely. Again, never buy based on what you hope or want to happen but it is very early in the Apple Silicon transition and many things are going to change before the two year time limit (which just started yesterday) is over.
I will admit to not knowing too much about this, but my impression was that eGPUs were connected to Intel’s PCI standard, and therefore would only function with Intel chipsets. So of course Apple Silicon would not support EGPUs.
If I understood the keynote correctly, it seemed like the Apple CPUs and graphics chips were designed to work directly together, cutting the overhead of external chipsets and therefore much faster and more efficient. This means you are counting on Apple’s graphics engineers as your sole source for graphics developments.
I was expecting to see a 16” MacBook Pro after the 13” MacBook Pro. So I was disappointed that didn’t happen. But the logical conclusion is that the larger MacBook Pro systems are going to be considerably faster than the lesser models and therefore very much worth looking at. I think we should pass judgement on Apple’s solutions here when the larger machine is introduced and benchmarked.
However, I’m tempted to buy a 13” MacBook Pro just so I can say I have it and am on the cutting edge ... just the typical programmer’s ego I’m afraid.
I concur with most of your post, although using the logic in your first paragraph we should not have been expecting Thunderbolt support, since Thunderbolt up until now "would only function with Intel chipsets." Somehow Apple managed to make Thunderbolt (v3) work, and (perhaps) they could have managed the same with PCI. Especially since the PCI standard is no longer managed by Intel but by PCI-SIG which has 800 members, but the primary members seem to be: Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm. I don't see Apple in there.
Every computer vendor in the world supports PCI. the M1 for sure has PCI or it would be Dead on Arrival. PCIe is the defacto standard that DDR memory runs over. The ignorance of some who called this Intel's PCI standard is sad in the year 2020.
Apple has already said that the M1 supports Gen 4 PCIe. It was on the hardware slide during the keynote.
This makes you wonder if Apple Silicon Mac Pros will also prohibit eGPUs. Or even internal GPUs on expansion cards.
It makes me think that Apple realizes that eGPU was a stupid idea to begin with.
As for internal expansion cards I don't think Apple has a choice if they want to remain competitive. At least not with the Mac Pro. Ultimately if you want max GPU performance you need a separate chip and RAM for that chip.
1) The Apple Silicon Macs don't have Thunderbolt 3 ports. They have USB 4 ports.
2) And, I'm sure the product page for the Blackmagic hasn't been touched in ages.
3) Apple has removed the Blackmagic eGPU from the MacBook Air's compatible accessories, as the article says.
1) Apple spec page specifies "Two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports" -> there is Thunderbolt. 2) The Black Magic product page has had its compatibility list updated. 3) see 2.
Believe what you want. There is no eGPU support on M1 Macs, full stop, and we have multiple sources inside Apple saying so.
Buy one for a M1 Mac at your own peril. You can't say that you weren't warned.
uhm... There was no belief there. I did not imply directly or indirectly that eGPUs are supported.
I use an eGPU (Vega56) with a MacBook Pro from 2018 and its been fantastic. I very occasionally have my 2018 MacBook Air connected to it and it is pretty good (but not great) with games but that's most likely due to the crappy CPU. I have ordered an M1 MacBook Air and am waiting for my trade-in box to arrive to ship off the MacBook Air - it's my secondary (tertiary?) machine and although eGPU support would have been nice, it's not required.
Maybe it was just an embarrassment to Apple to support external GPUs that had slower speeds than their internal one.
Well one of the main concerns was for most MacBooks, anything close to high end AMD GPUs wasn’t an option, we’ll just have to see how these perform to see if an eGPU option is really necessary (again, most pro users would save the eGPUs for the MacBook Pro or iMac or something that’s not today’s introduced Macs, so it’s a low bar).
Given the (limited) data that we have now for performance, the integrated GPU in Apple Silicon with eight GPU cores is about the same as a RX 590.
Huh? Apple said the onboard GPU in M1 is good for 2.3 TFLOPs. Intel Iris Xe in Tiger Lake is 2.1 TFLOPs. Radeon RX 590 is 7.1 TFLOPs
Apple likes to make this simple, to our detriment sometimes. TFLOP is a weird measure, and you need to be sure that you're comparing like with like half, single, double-precision, and we have no idea what that was based on.
The 590 comparison is derived from other measures that they've used like "three times faster" and the like for other machines. We'll all see together.
As others have point out all those x3 in macs where referring to previous versions of MacBook Air, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro 13, all of those never have had a AMD discrete GPU so they are comparing agains intel igpus as they mentioned specially when I think always said other integrated gpus in their slides they say the M1 GPU is 2.6 tflops (FP32 surely) and not only is the RX590 between 6.7 and 7.1 depending on its turbo speed, and that’s not all, the most powerful MacBook GPU is currently on the MacBook Pro 16 with a RX Pro 5600M which is around 5.3 tflops that combined with an 8 core CPU is better for gaming than a PS4 Pro, Xbox One X and Xbox Series S and even if it the M1 was faster that it isn’t I hope that in the future will give support again to eGPUs
Comments
Buy one for a M1 Mac at your own peril. You can't say that you weren't warned.
More important for most is how compatible and fast this new Rosetta is. That’s probably the big question that’s on the mind of all early adopters.
Give Apple time. This is round 1 of the M1 and Apple did a lot to improve the compute experience of probably 90% of their customer base. Apple goes with what’s ready at the time when they are ready to launch. They could have waited a year to make the switch to Core 2 Duo’s when they made the switch but they didn’t.
If you have really serious need for horsepower, you don't buy low end products designed for low end use.
It's like I own a Prius. It can't pull a teardrop trailer. For that I use my Sienna van. And if I wanted to pull something much bigger I'd invest in a Ford F150 or F350.
It's like that.
As others have said, this is Apple’s first foray into selling machines with their own CPU/GPU. Not only do Apple NOT target desktop-class performance with these, they don’t target high end gaming with them. They don’t target high-end gaming at all (which is why I’m likely to be buying a gaming PC while I sit around waiting to see which Mac I might buy for the rest of what I do with computers).
I’m surprised they even *mentioned* game engines, but I assume Unity is present in iOS development. These machines are fine for that, no? That’s what this serves: low-to-medium-end users and developers for their bigger-selling platform. The small RAM and small screen makes the first one of no interest to me, despite longing for a new portable with retina. More likely, I’ll end up with some future iMac, because I can’t afford buying multiple things and I already need to spend money on a second computer just for a gaming hobby.
As soon as I saw their original announcement of changing CPU, I knew this was going to be another big game of wait-and-see. I’m expecting dropped support for LOTS of things. The last two times the architecture changed, a lot of software was dropped, as was a lot of hardware via drivers and the companies who made the hardware not wanting to work on “obsolete” products.
This will be painful for some people and I’m waiting it out yet again. I only have so much money to spend, one time. I’m glad this much has already been released. That means the process might move along faster than I feared...
I'm completely lost on what point you're trying to make.
I would never buy hardware on a maybe they'll fix it later basis but I wouldn't completely lose hope either. At some point Apple has to replace the Mac Pro. Are they going to create 100+ W graphics cards for the Mac Pro? That seems unlikely. Again, never buy based on what you hope or want to happen but it is very early in the Apple Silicon transition and many things are going to change before the two year time limit (which just started yesterday) is over.
As for internal expansion cards I don't think Apple has a choice if they want to remain competitive. At least not with the Mac Pro. Ultimately if you want max GPU performance you need a separate chip and RAM for that chip.
I use an eGPU (Vega56) with a MacBook Pro from 2018 and its been fantastic. I very occasionally have my 2018 MacBook Air connected to it and it is pretty good (but not great) with games but that's most likely due to the crappy CPU. I have ordered an M1 MacBook Air and am waiting for my trade-in box to arrive to ship off the MacBook Air - it's my secondary (tertiary?) machine and although eGPU support would have been nice, it's not required.