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I just don't understand why Apple seems to prefer AMD. Bad experience with Nvidia's drivers in the old Core Two Duo MBPs? Does AMD have a better track record?

csydas 10y ago
Could be a lot of things: Power consumption, optimization for non-DirectX drivers, AMD could meet the parts demand from Apple. Apple ha(d) really specific requirements for their machines, so I don't doubt the decision was a result of whatever specification being met by AMD and not Nvidia at the time. Nvidia seems pretty happy in cornering the high-end market and can barely keep the 1000 series in stock at the moment.
- Qworg 10y ago
  Alternative options: NVidia is too expensive per unit or most Apple customers could care less about dedicated graphics. I think the latter is most likely - they don't sell their products on specs.
kitsunesoba 10y ago
Apple is a backer of and is invested in OpenCL. OS X itself leverages OpenCL throughout the OS (Quicklook for example uses it to make previews faster) and of course FCP/Motion/etc make heavy use of OpenCL as well. Nvidia cards are capable of OpenCL but they've never performed as well with it as they do with CUDA. AMD has always been the better option for that. Of course Apple could implement CUDA support in their software, but they've never been big on running with vendor specific standards that they had no part in the development of.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You have some outdated information. Although Apple created OpenCL and gave it to Khronos, they have the most outdated support for OpenCL. The future on Apple platforms is called Metal compute. There were around 6 Metal talks at WWDC 2016 and zero about Khronos technologies.
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    How does that impact the AMD vs. Nvidia part of the discussion?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      It doesn't matter which cards are better at OpenCL, because it is a legacy technology on Apple platforms, most likely to never be updated beyond the current version 1.2 (latest is 2.2). https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823 Apple develops their own drivers for Metal Compute.

csydas 10y ago

Could be a lot of things: Power consumption, optimization for non-DirectX drivers, AMD could meet the parts demand from Apple. Apple ha(d) really specific requirements for their machines, so I don't doubt the decision was a result of whatever specification being met by AMD and not Nvidia at the time. Nvidia seems pretty happy in cornering the high-end market and can barely keep the 1000 series in stock at the moment.

Qworg 10y ago
Alternative options: NVidia is too expensive per unit or most Apple customers could care less about dedicated graphics. I think the latter is most likely - they don't sell their products on specs.

kitsunesoba 10y ago

Apple is a backer of and is invested in OpenCL. OS X itself leverages OpenCL throughout the OS (Quicklook for example uses it to make previews faster) and of course FCP/Motion/etc make heavy use of OpenCL as well. Nvidia cards are capable of OpenCL but they've never performed as well with it as they do with CUDA. AMD has always been the better option for that. Of course Apple could implement CUDA support in their software, but they've never been big on running with vendor specific standards that they had no part in the development of.

pjmlp 10y ago
You have some outdated information. Although Apple created OpenCL and gave it to Khronos, they have the most outdated support for OpenCL. The future on Apple platforms is called Metal compute. There were around 6 Metal talks at WWDC 2016 and zero about Khronos technologies.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  How does that impact the AMD vs. Nvidia part of the discussion?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    It doesn't matter which cards are better at OpenCL, because it is a legacy technology on Apple platforms, most likely to never be updated beyond the current version 1.2 (latest is 2.2). https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202823 Apple develops their own drivers for Metal Compute.