mdriftmeyer

elijahg said:

I suspect the desktops will have a different CPU (M2? D1?) than the laptops. Presumably some iteration eventually will end up in the Mac Pro, with PCIe support, and with it PCIe GPUs. Either that or Apple will just abandon the iMac Pro and Mac Pro, I wouldn't be hugely surprised.

They abandon their pro lines they might as well stop selling Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X, because the entire creating markets will abandon them.

mazda 3s said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

curtis hannah said:

22july2013 said:

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

Most people are ignorant of how powerful GPUs are.

The new Radeon RX 6800 for instance:

22july2013 said:

saarek said:

22july2013 said:

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.

No one is going to buy a Mac Mini M1 who wants to work in the Audio/Video/Graphics worlds. They're forcing people to go iMac/Mac Pro or whatever this phantom Mac Pro Tiny crap will be.

You don't release a beast [albeit should have been Threadripper based/EPYC ROME based] Mac Pro with all the MPX options for GPGPUs, Afterburner, third party OEM add-ons and less than a year later you shat the bed and knee cap everyone that is not a mere Consumption owner nor a Mac Pro production creative person, but Apple just did.

landcruiser said:

eGPU’s will go the way of the “arithmetic co-processor” eventually as technology improves. 

You tell yourself that.

CNYMacUser said:

jcc said:

This article paints a too rosy picture of the transition. The fact of the matter is that moving away from x86 will end Mac’s “best of both worlds” status. That means no more running Windows software.

In over 20 years and Thousands of both Mac & Windows Users I have serviced, I have yet to meet ONE person who wants or needs to run Windows on a Mac. It's two separate Worlds plain and simple. Anyone who thinks otherwise is FUBAR.

In over 20 years there have been billions of computers sold, so your anecdotal evidence of the rare Windows and Mac user in one very much an edge case. Major universities when they have Macs have Bootcamp. All Engineering fields if they have Macs have Bootcamp. Apple isn't making a dent like people believe around the globe deployed Mac Hardware for macOS yet, even in 2020. They are hoping to force people into ARM and macOS only to complete their vertical ecosystem. 

The resources they save on supporting both x86 and ARM is minuscule in terms of labor and capital investment. Apple Silicon will never be the CPU king for its straight CPU to CPU performance metrics. They are banking on the add-on modules to be the heavy lifters. The FPGAs, DSPs, etc.

With AMD buying Xilinx they got the King of those very markets, globally in-house. AMD's own CPUs will be augmented and not resemble what they look like today moving forward.

AMD also has a license for ARM like Apple. If AMD wants it can jump to ARM only as well, and their processors have over 40 years of experience including the last ten years of experience with ARM. Xilinx has a ton of experience with ARM, even more than AMD.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html


Apple will always be successful with whatever ISA it has a license to use. And it is the leader in embedded consumer electronic operating systems. 

You're kidding yourselves if you think after 23 years since the NeXT Merger that Apple will take over the world on the Laptop/Desktop/Workstation spaces. Apple created Bootcamp to increase sales of Macs not to move people to macOS. The hardware sales were sluggish but having Bootcamp for the professional/business world gives people the quality of Mac hardware and the requirements of their company's Microsoft Windows mandate.

The fact Microsoft hasn't seen any measurable increase of sales for their own ARM products and Windows is a sign Apple doesn't expect to double or triple their market share with ARM.

Their bread n' butter continues to be the embedded space with iOS. They could have made this transition full force three years from now and had industry leading tech via AMD for their Mac lines while Silicon quietly matures, but they jumped the shark a bit on this one.