4 ms·

>> > The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple woul

>> > The problem is that Apple has moved to a home-grown stack for it graphics and deprecated OpenGL and moved wholly to Metal. [...] There is no way Apple would create a Windows driver for that custom silicon—it has always relied on AMD or Nvidia for those drivers in the past, it has no in house code base or expertise to write the requisite code in Windows and none of the silicon has been optimized for it. That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics... On top of that, instead of bootcamp Apple could still support virtualisation to be able to run Windows ARM on Apple ARM hardware and write a paravirtualized GPU driver that just translates guest DirectX/OpenGL/Vulkan to host Metal, similar to what pretty all other hypervisors are doing already.

danaris 6y ago
> That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics... While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics—after all, the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on uses Intel HD graphics when it doesn't have to spin up the Radeon. And I wouldn't really want to bet that the Intel onboard graphics are/will be less powerful than Apple's.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics But there's no reason those have to work in Windows. Apple isn't going to care if Windows gets crappy battery life. The bigger question is, if Bootcamp would only work with a small portion of Apple's machines anyway, and you'd have to run a version of Windows which no one really wants, and Windows just generally isn't as necessary in 2020 as it was in 2006... is Apple going to bother?

danaris 6y ago

> That's assuming there will only be ARM-based macs that use Apple GPU's, which doesn't make sense. For iMac/Mac Pro/Macbook Pro I fully expect those would still be equipped with AMD GPU's. Good as the Apple GPU's are for mobile hardware, they are nowhere near the performance and feature set of desktop-class hardware. This would also free up a lot of silicon on the CPU die to allow for higher core counts, bigger caches etc. I think ~50% of the A13 SoC die is just for graphics... While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics—after all, the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on uses Intel HD graphics when it doesn't have to spin up the Radeon. And I wouldn't really want to bet that the Intel onboard graphics are/will be less powerful than Apple's.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> While I agree that the higher-end machines will still have discrete graphics, that doesn't mean they won't also use on-die graphics But there's no reason those have to work in Windows. Apple isn't going to care if Windows gets crappy battery life. The bigger question is, if Bootcamp would only work with a small portion of Apple's machines anyway, and you'd have to run a version of Windows which no one really wants, and Windows just generally isn't as necessary in 2020 as it was in 2006... is Apple going to bother?