3 ms·

They both have competitive Linux drivers which has even less market share. Given how little kernel-specific is even in the driver I don't see any reason to beli

They both have competitive Linux drivers which has even less market share. Given how little kernel-specific is even in the driver I don't see any reason to believe Nvidia or AMD wouldn't happily provide their latest and greatest driver. Especially since they are competing for that bid for whose GPU Apple blesses for that generation of Mac hardware.

GeekyBear 9y ago
You can buy their graphics cards and plug them into a computer running Linux, say in a render farm. The only Mac you can purchase and use their products in exited production half a decade ago. Without the possibility of making sales, why would they bother? Apple's pro software made a big bet on OpenCL in the past, so I don't see them going with anybody but ATI for built in GPUs until they root that dependency out of their software and switch over to Metal for compute. Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance, so I can't see them getting a design win with Apple as long as Apple's in house software is still using OpenCL.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  > Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080-OpenCL-vs-CUDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080... OpenCL performs great on Nvidia.
  - GeekyBear 9y ago
    Perhaps so, but they haven't seen a design win for a discrete GPU on the Mac since 2013 for the iMac, and 2014 for the Macbook Pro. That happens to be not terribly long after Apple started offering rewrites of their pro apps that went all in on OpenCL. Nvidia did put out a driver for the cheese grater Mac pro so it can use Pascal based cards, which is nice, but I imagine that's motivated by a desire to maintain CUDA dominance.

3 ms·

They both have competitive Linux drivers which has even less market share. Given how little kernel-specific is even in the driver I don't see any reason to beli

by kllrnohj 9y ago

GeekyBear 9y ago
You can buy their graphics cards and plug them into a computer running Linux, say in a render farm. The only Mac you can purchase and use their products in exited production half a decade ago. Without the possibility of making sales, why would they bother? Apple's pro software made a big bet on OpenCL in the past, so I don't see them going with anybody but ATI for built in GPUs until they root that dependency out of their software and switch over to Metal for compute. Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance, so I can't see them getting a design win with Apple as long as Apple's in house software is still using OpenCL.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  > Nvidia certainly isn't going to put OpenCL performance on an equal footing with CUDA performance And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080-OpenCL-vs-CUDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTX-1080... OpenCL performs great on Nvidia.
  - GeekyBear 9y ago
    Perhaps so, but they haven't seen a design win for a discrete GPU on the Mac since 2013 for the iMac, and 2014 for the Macbook Pro. That happens to be not terribly long after Apple started offering rewrites of their pro apps that went all in on OpenCL. Nvidia did put out a driver for the cheese grater Mac pro so it can use Pascal based cards, which is nice, but I imagine that's motivated by a desire to maintain CUDA dominance.