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That issue is actually quite interesting. It's because if the GPU is reverse engineered enough, you can simulate an Apple GPU on another machine _and_ run othe

• hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
  There's two parts to this issue: one is reverse engineering the Apple driver interface, the other is reverse engineering the third party target hardware interface. Most vendors of graphics hardware keep their interface secret, but not all. The problem is that the set of hardware that isn't secret won't overlap much with what people have or want to run, which is pretty central to what makes Hackintoshes attractive.
• chongli 6y ago
  The little I’ve heard about the M1 makes it sound radically different in one respect: the system RAM is unified with the video RAM and shared, rather than partitioned the way it usually is on integrated video. Now I don’t know anything about GPU stacks, but I could imagine that one change essentially requiring a rewrite of the entire stack if certain assumptions were baked into the old one. The new model would seem to allow the developer to allocate a buffer full of stuff and rapidly alternate between CPU and GPU instructions on that buffer, without copying. If so, that’s a pretty huge win for performance.
  • my123 6y ago
    That's present on basically every Arm SoC, with the CPU and GPU on the same die. (and Intel & AMD APUs too, the difference is that Apple is scaling UMA beyond what anyone did for sold systems in x86 land that aren't consoles) Currently, Apple and NVIDIA have the beefiest UMA w/ the CPU GPUs available, and those are Arm solutions.