mdriftmeyer

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.

salmonstk said:

gareth2210 said:

The cost of the chip might reduce but the cost of developing the next one and keeping ahead of Intel will not. It's not just a matter of reusing iPhone chips - Mac chips will need their own special sauce. Apple should use any spare to invest in research to increase the distance between Macintosh and the rest.

Ah but Apple has already laid out those costs.  Their R&D going up is in no small part to these chip developments.  But that money they have already spent.  The marginal cost of these chips is going to be much less that what they pay intel.  And they will not be splitting those "fixed" costs over millions of phones iPads and macs.

CPU designs are never ``money already spent.'' It's a continuous ever increasing investment.

red oak said:

The performance + battery improvements alone are enough to fundamentally change Apple's unit market share in the PC industry.    This analyst seems to be missing that fundamental point.   A lower priced SKU variant is just the icing on the cake.  

It'll be generations behind AMD in performance and won't gain much now that AMD will own Xilinx. Both will be introducing FPGAs and more DSPs to their CPU designs. AMD has the most advanced CPU designs in the world.

Prices will be the same but their profit margins will increase due to being the CPU designer.

From TechPowerUp Article on a Hacintosh using the new Ryzen 9 5950X

https://www.techpowerup.com/273426/amd-ryzen-9-5950x-16-core-zen-3-processor-overclocked-to-6-ghz-and-geekbenched

This is without any Zen optimizations running on Apple Hardware with the latest Catalina, using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X engineering sample.

Any questions? This is why Apple should have dumped Intel, gone AMD as it matured Apple Silicon for a few more years at least.