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Apple's marketing materials related to the M1 underlined the point that an integrated GPU is not a bad thing because of the unified memory / high bandwidth. I a
by mastazi 5y ago
Apple's marketing materials related to the M1 underlined the point that an integrated GPU is not a bad thing because of the unified memory / high bandwidth. I agree with that point.
So, I expect that if they come out with a "discrete" GPU, they will have some innovative solution in terms of communication between the main SoC and the GPU, and maybe there won't be a PCIe connector like we are used to in PCs.
- dathinab 5y agoOr they do something similar like Intel recently did: Advertise some magic to use both the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics, but in the end it was just a more or less straight forward distribution of workloads over multiple GPU's without any "hardware" magic. And IMHO that probably is good enough for most use cases if done well, as many common tasks can be split surprisingly well e.g. run desktop and application GUI as well as fast hardware accelerated (already existing) video decoder on iGPU but place the video encoding and complex computations on the discrete GPU or similar.
- mastazi 5y agoYes you are right, they could follow a model where the main silicon itself is unchanged compared to laptops/iMac/Mini - so there is still the integrated GPU, and the discrete GPU is an addition to it. I think your guess makes more sense than mine, because from Apple's point of view it would be good not having to deal with additional SKUs in the Apple Silicon line.