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All very impressive, but here's my question: what are they going to do about graphics cards? Will they find a way to connect existing graphics cards to their CP

All very impressive, but here's my question: what are they going to do about graphics cards? Will they find a way to connect existing graphics cards to their CPU? Will they make their own ARM-based graphics cards? Will AMD or Nvidia?

jeroenhd 6y ago
Nvidia? Ha, never in a million years. Support for one of the recent Radeons was recently added to macOS, so it's a possibility. No reason the M1 can't do PCIe, as far as I know the only thing keeping eGPUs from working on the M1 right now is software support. It could also be that the driver was added because of the extensibility of the Pro, though. My expectation is that they'll keep the GPU on the same level, which is "good enough for most users", and focus on hardware acceleration for tasks like video and audio encoding and decoding instead. With an ML chip and fast audiovisual processing, most consumers don't need a beefy GPU at all, as long as you stick to Apple's proprietary standards. Seems like a win-win for Apple if they don't add in an external GPU.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  And are you thinking the solution for people who do need a powerful GPU is eGPUs and Mac Pros?
  - Pulcinella 6y ago
    Well unless Apple can pull an M1 and do with their GPUs what they did with their CPUs and start to embarrass Nvidia and AMD with lower power, higher performance GPUs.
  - jeroenhd 6y ago
    I don't think Apple cares much for those people, they can buy the Mac Pro or a PC if they really need the GPU power. eGPUs can be a nice addition, but I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system. You're already limited to AMD GPUs after the clusterfuck of a fight Apple and Nvidia had, and I doubt Intel's Xe lineup will receive much love for Apple right after the Intel CPUs have been cut from Apple's products. Honestly, for the kind of work that does need an arbitrary amount of GPU horsepower, you're barking at the wrong tree if you buy Apple. Get yourself a Macbook and a console or game streaming service if you want to play video games, and get yourself a workstation if you want to do CAD work. I don't think the work Apple would need to put into a GPU solution would be worth it, financially speaking.
    - culturestate 6y ago
      > I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system They already have one[1], and you can even buy eGPUs from the Apple Store[2]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 2. https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/HM8Y2B/A/blackmagic-egpu https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/HM8Y2B/A/blackmagic-eg...
      - jakeva 6y ago
        That's a Radeon Pro 580, AFAIK this eGPU offering hasn't been updated in several years.
        culturestate 6y ago
        That specific one is, yes, but you can also buy third party Thunderbolt 3 sleds (eg Razer makes one) and use more recent cards.
    - robenkleene 6y ago
      How would you fit Apple's AR/VR ambitions into this perspective? (I.e., given AR/VR has steeper GPU requirements, both on the consumption and creation side.)
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  Yeah I imagine the Radeon support was for the Pro and the existing Intel Macs (though I don’t know if those Radeon GPUs are really supported via eGPU. Are there enclosures where they fit?) Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use? It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane (and maybe Redshift and other GPU accelerated 3D renderers) to support Metal (to the point where it sounds like there may have been Apple Metal engineers basically working at Otoy to help develop Octane for Metal) and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see eGPU support announced for ARM Macs at WWDC (and maybe even the iPad Pros that support Thunderbolt. Yeah the idea of plugging your iPad into an eGPU enclosure is funny, but if it’s not to hard to implement, why not?)
  - volta83 6y ago
    > Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use? What do mac users need a beefy gpu for? AFAICT apple just need a GPU that's good enough for most users not to complain, integrated Intel-GPU style.
    - Pulcinella 6y ago
      What I said in before, 3D rendering (and video processing and anything else you might want a powerful GPU for).
      - volta83 6y ago
        Do people do 3D rendering on macs ? (there are no GPUs available with hardware raytracing support...) Most people I know doing 3D rendering nowadays just connect their UI to a remote rendering farm. So a Macbook Air would be more than enough for that. For video processing you don't need 3D rendering capabilities, just hardware acceleration for the video formats you are using.
Hamuko 6y ago
Kinda feels like Apple's choice at the moment is just their own integrated GPUs. eGPU is also a possibility.
- asaddhamani 6y ago
  Will probably not be great for battery life
akmarinov 6y ago
Option 1 - yes, they will Option 2 - no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway. Option 2.5 - bring back eGPU
- bogwog 6y ago
  > no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway. True, but previous macs were never really competitive with PC alternatives on the hardware side, since they all used the same chips just with a higher price tag. With M1, that's starting to change, and Apple has the opportunity to attract a much large customer base for Mac than it ever has. And of course, they're much more interested in gaming nowadays thanks to iOS. Maybe not interested enough to suck up their pride and apologize to Nvidia for giving them the finger, but probably enough to at least stick a beefier GPU into macs.
  - needle0 6y ago
    Even putting aside the performance issue, Apple and gaming have never worked together quite well. Apple's modus operandi of quickly and frequently deprecating old architectures and requiring app developers to constantly keep up goes down very badly with the traditional video game development model - of spending time and budget finishing up one game, releasing a few patches, then moving on to the next game with little further upkeep or maintenance of the now-done game. (Yes, games as a service is more common nowadays, but a huge number of games still go by this old model.) This model relies on long-term compatibility of old binaries on the platform being pretty stable, which is fairly true for consoles and Windows, but Apple platforms are anything but. There are massive piles upon piles of only slightly old games that are not just unsupported but simply refuse to run on both the iOS App Store and Steam for Mac (including Valve's own back catalog!), due to the abandonment of 32-bit binary support a few versions back. And even if the developer is willing to do bare minimum upkeep work to recompile an old game and make it run on current hardware, chances are that between the time of release and now, lots of new mandatory hoops (eg. natively support a certain screen size) have been added to the app store checklist so that passing store certification requires tons more work than a simple recompile, further deterring the dev. Perhaps you could chalk it up to the dev being lazy for not doing regular maintenance of the game, but the rest of the game industry doesn't force you to do that, while only Apple does.
agloeregrets 6y ago
To make a Mac Pro-scale system with real gains, they would roughly need the equal of 9x the number of performance cores of an M1 (~36 to 48 cores), if they were to scale GPU in the same way (72 core GPU) you are looking at a 72 core GPU with over 23 TFlops (FP32), they could also find room in clock speeds and 5nm+ to get an additional 10 out of it I imagine. In general that would be enough for many but I wouldn't be too surprised to see them do something more exotic with their own GPU.
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Why would Apple build fancy graphics cards? They have no meaningful gaming market and haven't cared about it for years. For machine learning?
- alkonaut 6y ago
  They don't need to build them, but they need their machines to be able to use them (for the same reasons their current pro machines use them).
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  They already have. Their integrated graphics now rival that of discrete gaming laptops.
  - hu3 6y ago
    Rival how? A Surface Book 3 with an intel processor and an outdated Nvidia 1650 TI laps around M1 in games. Almost 2x performance. I'm not even going to compare it to laptops with modern GPUs. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
reasonabl_human 6y ago
They are R&D’ing their own GPUs to vertically integrate according to some rumors from my Apple friends.

jeroenhd 6y ago

Nvidia? Ha, never in a million years. Support for one of the recent Radeons was recently added to macOS, so it's a possibility. No reason the M1 can't do PCIe, as far as I know the only thing keeping eGPUs from working on the M1 right now is software support. It could also be that the driver was added because of the extensibility of the Pro, though. My expectation is that they'll keep the GPU on the same level, which is "good enough for most users", and focus on hardware acceleration for tasks like video and audio encoding and decoding instead. With an ML chip and fast audiovisual processing, most consumers don't need a beefy GPU at all, as long as you stick to Apple's proprietary standards. Seems like a win-win for Apple if they don't add in an external GPU.

robenkleene 6y ago
And are you thinking the solution for people who do need a powerful GPU is eGPUs and Mac Pros?
- Pulcinella 6y ago
  Well unless Apple can pull an M1 and do with their GPUs what they did with their CPUs and start to embarrass Nvidia and AMD with lower power, higher performance GPUs.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  I don't think Apple cares much for those people, they can buy the Mac Pro or a PC if they really need the GPU power. eGPUs can be a nice addition, but I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system. You're already limited to AMD GPUs after the clusterfuck of a fight Apple and Nvidia had, and I doubt Intel's Xe lineup will receive much love for Apple right after the Intel CPUs have been cut from Apple's products. Honestly, for the kind of work that does need an arbitrary amount of GPU horsepower, you're barking at the wrong tree if you buy Apple. Get yourself a Macbook and a console or game streaming service if you want to play video games, and get yourself a workstation if you want to do CAD work. I don't think the work Apple would need to put into a GPU solution would be worth it, financially speaking.
  - culturestate 6y ago
    > I doubt Apple will release an official eGPU system They already have one[1], and you can even buy eGPUs from the Apple Store[2]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544 2. https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/HM8Y2B/A/blackmagic-egpu https://www.apple.com/sg/shop/product/HM8Y2B/A/blackmagic-eg...
    - jakeva 6y ago
      That's a Radeon Pro 580, AFAIK this eGPU offering hasn't been updated in several years.
      - culturestate 6y ago
        That specific one is, yes, but you can also buy third party Thunderbolt 3 sleds (eg Razer makes one) and use more recent cards.
  - robenkleene 6y ago
    How would you fit Apple's AR/VR ambitions into this perspective? (I.e., given AR/VR has steeper GPU requirements, both on the consumption and creation side.)
Pulcinella 6y ago
Yeah I imagine the Radeon support was for the Pro and the existing Intel Macs (though I don’t know if those Radeon GPUs are really supported via eGPU. Are there enclosures where they fit?) Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use? It seems that Apple has put in a lot of development resources into getting Octane (and maybe Redshift and other GPU accelerated 3D renderers) to support Metal (to the point where it sounds like there may have been Apple Metal engineers basically working at Otoy to help develop Octane for Metal) and I can’t just imagine that happening just to support the the Apple Silicon GPUs. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see eGPU support announced for ARM Macs at WWDC (and maybe even the iPad Pros that support Thunderbolt. Yeah the idea of plugging your iPad into an eGPU enclosure is funny, but if it’s not to hard to implement, why not?)
- volta83 6y ago
  > Still I can’t see Apple only developing one integrated GPU per year unless they somehow figure out how to magically make them somewhat approach Nvidia and AMDs modern chips. What would the ARM Mac Pro use? What do mac users need a beefy gpu for? AFAICT apple just need a GPU that's good enough for most users not to complain, integrated Intel-GPU style.
  - Pulcinella 6y ago
    What I said in before, 3D rendering (and video processing and anything else you might want a powerful GPU for).
    - volta83 6y ago
      Do people do 3D rendering on macs ? (there are no GPUs available with hardware raytracing support...) Most people I know doing 3D rendering nowadays just connect their UI to a remote rendering farm. So a Macbook Air would be more than enough for that. For video processing you don't need 3D rendering capabilities, just hardware acceleration for the video formats you are using.

Hamuko 6y ago

Kinda feels like Apple's choice at the moment is just their own integrated GPUs. eGPU is also a possibility.

asaddhamani 6y ago
Will probably not be great for battery life

akmarinov 6y ago

Option 1 - yes, they will Option 2 - no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway. Option 2.5 - bring back eGPU

bogwog 6y ago
> no, but does it matter? It's not like the previous gen Macs had great GPUs and no one is gaming on a Mac anyway. True, but previous macs were never really competitive with PC alternatives on the hardware side, since they all used the same chips just with a higher price tag. With M1, that's starting to change, and Apple has the opportunity to attract a much large customer base for Mac than it ever has. And of course, they're much more interested in gaming nowadays thanks to iOS. Maybe not interested enough to suck up their pride and apologize to Nvidia for giving them the finger, but probably enough to at least stick a beefier GPU into macs.
- needle0 6y ago
  Even putting aside the performance issue, Apple and gaming have never worked together quite well. Apple's modus operandi of quickly and frequently deprecating old architectures and requiring app developers to constantly keep up goes down very badly with the traditional video game development model - of spending time and budget finishing up one game, releasing a few patches, then moving on to the next game with little further upkeep or maintenance of the now-done game. (Yes, games as a service is more common nowadays, but a huge number of games still go by this old model.) This model relies on long-term compatibility of old binaries on the platform being pretty stable, which is fairly true for consoles and Windows, but Apple platforms are anything but. There are massive piles upon piles of only slightly old games that are not just unsupported but simply refuse to run on both the iOS App Store and Steam for Mac (including Valve's own back catalog!), due to the abandonment of 32-bit binary support a few versions back. And even if the developer is willing to do bare minimum upkeep work to recompile an old game and make it run on current hardware, chances are that between the time of release and now, lots of new mandatory hoops (eg. natively support a certain screen size) have been added to the app store checklist so that passing store certification requires tons more work than a simple recompile, further deterring the dev. Perhaps you could chalk it up to the dev being lazy for not doing regular maintenance of the game, but the rest of the game industry doesn't force you to do that, while only Apple does.

agloeregrets 6y ago

To make a Mac Pro-scale system with real gains, they would roughly need the equal of 9x the number of performance cores of an M1 (~36 to 48 cores), if they were to scale GPU in the same way (72 core GPU) you are looking at a 72 core GPU with over 23 TFlops (FP32), they could also find room in clock speeds and 5nm+ to get an additional 10 out of it I imagine. In general that would be enough for many but I wouldn't be too surprised to see them do something more exotic with their own GPU.

NelsonMinar 6y ago

Why would Apple build fancy graphics cards? They have no meaningful gaming market and haven't cared about it for years. For machine learning?

alkonaut 6y ago
They don't need to build them, but they need their machines to be able to use them (for the same reasons their current pro machines use them).
Synaesthesia 6y ago
They already have. Their integrated graphics now rival that of discrete gaming laptops.
- hu3 6y ago
  Rival how? A Surface Book 3 with an intel processor and an outdated Nvidia 1650 TI laps around M1 in games. Almost 2x performance. I'm not even going to compare it to laptops with modern GPUs. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

reasonabl_human 6y ago

They are R&D’ing their own GPUs to vertically integrate according to some rumors from my Apple friends.