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How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d

How do you think the announcement that OSX will be supporting external graphics cards fit into Adobe/Autodesks plans? I don’t really do much video, photo or 3d editing these days but isn’t that all GPU driven? If that’s the case then couldn’t someone like Nvidia pick up the slack for Apple with a really nice external modular offering?

jlouis 9y ago
It is also quite likely Apple will try to add some kind of SIMD chip to their ARM efforts. Things just got a hole lot more interesting if we can wrestle Intel from their current leader position.
abakker 9y ago
I use both Adobe and Autodesk, and neither yet support eGPU well. Essentially, if they wrote their own graphics engines (both adobe and autodesk did) then eGPU doesn't work that well. Lightroom has started to come over, and some features of Fusion360 seem to work OK, too, but for the most part the only eGPU accelerated parts of the apps seem to be the user interfaces. Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.
Stranger43 9y ago
Sure nvidia could build a traditional co-processor card(just like in the old SBUS days) but what are the chance of apple releasing hardware with that kind of extendability after going all in on the IOSification of the mac?, even thunderbolt(which is a much lower level bus then USB3) did not support the same kind of performance as a proper PCIe slot. And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space. You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.

jlouis 9y ago

It is also quite likely Apple will try to add some kind of SIMD chip to their ARM efforts. Things just got a hole lot more interesting if we can wrestle Intel from their current leader position.

abakker 9y ago

I use both Adobe and Autodesk, and neither yet support eGPU well. Essentially, if they wrote their own graphics engines (both adobe and autodesk did) then eGPU doesn't work that well. Lightroom has started to come over, and some features of Fusion360 seem to work OK, too, but for the most part the only eGPU accelerated parts of the apps seem to be the user interfaces. Given Apple's recent obsession with AR/VR, I wouldn't be surprised if the new apple architecture was really GPU first, CPU second. Apple has always loved graphics, and in all likelihood they recognize that a more parallel OS model might actually suit people's day to day needs better.

Stranger43 9y ago

Sure nvidia could build a traditional co-processor card(just like in the old SBUS days) but what are the chance of apple releasing hardware with that kind of extendability after going all in on the IOSification of the mac?, even thunderbolt(which is a much lower level bus then USB3) did not support the same kind of performance as a proper PCIe slot. And even if you could most of the software in question is composed of countless components some of whom predates the mac itself and porting that to support anthing but the traditional big core CPU platform is not a trival thing to do, which is why the Xeon powered workstations and servers still exists and why manycore designs only really work in the supercomputer space. You could argue that the workstation itself is a dead concept and that the future is "cloud" with html5 frontends even for video and CAD workloads* which is something autocad and adobe is likely working on as a long term strategy, but in the short term they need the workstation that post Jobs apple don't appear to to have any interest in building.