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Was their lack of OpenCL adoption on the trashcan Mac Pro really all attributable to OpenCL? Or was it because the best GPU option it ever had was the FirePro
by wlesieutre 7y ago
Was their lack of OpenCL adoption on the trashcan Mac Pro really all attributable to OpenCL?
Or was it because the best GPU option it ever had was the FirePro D700 from 2014?
I guess you could buy a bunch of eGPU enclosures and hook up better GPUs over Thunderbolt (I think those ports are effectively PCIe x4), but regardless of how much effort they may have put in on the software side, they didn't keep up with the hardware. And being a proprietary GPU module in a thermally limited environment, they didn't have 3rd parties keeping up with it for them.
Blender (specifically their Cycles rendering engine) was one piece of software that supported OpenCL on the Mac, and AMD put a bunch of work into getting that working as an alternative to CUDA. It's now been disabled on account of Apple deprecating OpenCL. Bummer. https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-December/049695.html https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem...
- ogre_codes 7y ago> Was their lack of OpenCL adoption on the trashcan Mac Pro really all attributable to OpenCL? I'm not sure I follow you here. The trash bin Mac Pro was flawed from day 1 and the fact that it's seen few upgrades (and no significant upgrades) in the 6 years since hasn't helped it a bit. I'm not attributing the failure of the Mac Pro to OpenCL, it flopped all on it's own.
- wlesieutre 7y agoI'm not attributing the failure of the Mac Pro to OpenCL, I'm attributing the failure of OpenCL to the Mac Pro. If they wanted OpenCL to unseat CUDA (or even compete with it) for professional GPU compute users, they needed competitive GPU hardware, and they didn't have it.
- dwaite 7y agoThere was plenty of OpenCL shipping with AMD on other platforms. Apple is not interested in a market competitor to CUDA, only an alternative since they don't ship Nvidia GPUs across their lineup.