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For those that think Apple can't pull this off, remember that they dominate the developer laptop market. They just need to incrementally slip it in via software
by dev_dull 7y ago
For those that think Apple can't pull this off, remember that they dominate the developer laptop market. They just need to incrementally slip it in via software and hardware.
For example I recently found myself doing some video encoding via ffmpeg. The default install from brew supports videotoolbox (T2 chip accelerated) out of the box, and boy howdy is it fast. It smokes my multicore intel server optimized with vaapi.
Soon users will do a `pip install pytorch` on their dev laptop and get the metal-optimized version of it without even thinking twice. Apple already has their foot in the door.
- lliamander 7y agoI don't know about dominate. From the most recent Stack Overflow survey, 25% of developers used Mac, 25% used Linux/BSD, and 50% used windows.
- dev_dull 7y agoMaybe I should say it dominates for silicon valley tech companies and startups, which is manifestly obvious to anyone who works here.
- lliamander 7y agoFair enough. I'm "valley-adjacent" and so I see plenty of that.
- tensor 7y agoThat would be amazing, but I'll believe it when I see it. So far Apple hasn't seemed to care at all about open tools like pytorch or tensorflow. An independent developer might be able to modify a video encoding library to support metal easily enough, but getting pytorch or tensorflow to work seems to require serious support, support that has yet to show itself.
- jpambrun 7y agoYou can play around with ML on your laptop, but serious work is typically done in the cloud. I use powerful Nvidia GPUs from my MacBook every day.