Dan_Dilger

fastasleep said:

commentzilla said:

crowley said:

I wonder if the higher end Macs will have A chips with integrated GPUs, or if there will be non-GPU variants where Apple have a dedicated separate GPU, presumably from AMD.

I'm guessing we may have seen the last of AMD / NIVIDA in any future Mac. The ARM GPU cores are no less as impressive or scalable than the CPU cores. That's another significant cost savings for Apple. It also insures that the GPU is optimized for Metal. This was the point of Metal from the beginning and why OpenGL was sent to the dustbin. Apple has been planning this move for almost a decade and I think it runs much deeper and faster than most people suspect; no INTEL/AMD, no AMD/NIVIDA and soon no Qualcomm.

I'm wondering if any of the companies working on 3D apps/renderers currently being ported to Metal/AMD knew that they were actually working towards Metal/Apple GPU. 

Well, Nvidia had pretty strong reasons for refusing to support Apple Metal, as we wrote about:

mattinoz said:

mjtomlin said:

These new Macs will still support discrete GPUs. There’s no reason to think they won’t.

Would not be at all surprised if the Developer kits have a GPU in them. Given they were supposedly driving the XDR display.

The new iPad Pro already supports 4K resolution output over USB-C (DisplayPort). It doesn't even need Thunderbolt.

thedazzler said:

Would it be possible (with development) to plug your phone into your Mac to double the processor power similar to how external GPUs work today? 

Not really, if for no other reason than USB 2.0 would be a really slow backplane (!)

Apple could, conceivably, offer Macs with multiple SoCs, or offer new specialized coprocessor units similar to the Mac Pro Afterburner, an expansion card (on the very fast PCIe bus) that can rapidly accelerate tasks such as video rendering.

That said, the Holy Grail of "upgradable CPU engines" hasn't often delivered on expectations outside of the basic PC box, because modern MacBooks and mobile devices are deeply integrated internally and their parts wear out or grow obsolete basically in tandem. 

A big gaming PC might easily benefit from a faster CPU or a graphics card update, but trying to add that sort of modularity to a light, thin device makes a lot less sense and creates new drawbacks. By the time your CPU is feeling slow, the memory and storage on your notebook are probably also due for an upgrade; the screen and keyboard and wireless and lots of other features also likely need to be replaced. So it's generally more useful to hand your old Mac to a user with more basic needs and buy a new one. 

One exception to that might be the new Mac Pro, which is designed for upgradability. Apple could even sell upgrade logic boards for it, along with faster CPUs and GPU cards. These might even be more cost-effective than selling buyers new cases and shipping around those big heavy aluminum boxes. This would certainly be useful in places where people are installing rack-mounted units. 

rob53 said:

Good article but you left out how virtualization works and after doing a quick search of Apple's new Developer app, nothing showed up. Nothing for Rosetta either. Doesn't surprise me because it's probably a very proprietary set of software and hardware, which is fine with me.

I saw that Parallels released a blog article mentioned their prototype version of Parallels was used for the demo but nothing about which port of Debian was used. Their blog keeps saying to check back later. Has anyone been able to ask this question of any of the macOS Big Sur Apple people during a WWDC conference call? If Parallels only had to create an Apple Silicon version of Parallels (ok, Im stopping to say ARM because it's obviously a lot more than just ARM developers will have to content with) while macOS Big Sur using Rosetta did the "conversion" then that is also a huge step by Apple. 

Rosetta 2 does not support translation for virtualization 

nuclide said:

Arm Holdings (stylized as arm) is a semiconductor and software design company wholly owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group and its Vision Fund. 

How is ARM "majority-owned by Chinese interests?"

Yes that's partially correct. In 2018, SoftBank set up an ARM China joint venture and then sold off half of the interest in that to Chinese interests. That was likely to get around US restrictions on sharing ARM technology with Huawei. SoftBank also still needs money, so it could go further and sell more of ARM Ltd. In any case, apart from Qualcomm and Samsung, pretty much all of the mobile competitors using ARM are served by ARM China.  

crowley said:

I wonder if the higher end Macs will have A chips with integrated GPUs, or if there will be non-GPU variants where Apple have a dedicated separate GPU, presumably from AMD.

Having a dedicated GPU available would not require a "non-GPU variant," nor would that really even be desirable. 

Current MacBook Pros have Intel Core chips with integrated Intel GPUs, and more powerful AMD GPUs that can be turned on when more graphics HP is needed.