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Just built a workstation with an older Threadripper Pro. It has 128 PCIE lanes, for 7 16-lane PCIE slots. An egpu has 4. I have one GPU, at x16, and I can add m
by lowbloodsugar 5mo ago
Just built a workstation with an older Threadripper Pro. It has 128 PCIE lanes, for 7 16-lane PCIE slots. An egpu has 4. I have one GPU, at x16, and I can add more.
Most people don't need that, but most people don't need an eGPU either. The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling. For LLMs, hanging a 5090 off the thunderbolt port makes prompt processing fast, but I will be surprised if the M6 doesn't come with silicon just for that, as its the current gap. M5 is quite adequate for token generation for the price, given the RAM quantity and bandwidth. An M6 that accelerates TTFT would make an eGPU irrelevant.
For gaming, the threadripper gets at least +50FPS for windows vs linux, and some games just freeze for periods of time on linux with things like dynamic frame generation. I have an SSD for windows just for gaming.
- bigyabai 5mo ago> The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling. This. eGPUs fade in and out of relevance every few years, and even back in the Intel Macbook days there were people advocating for eGPU gaming with Bootcamp. It was a terrible solution, there is every reason to avoid macOS with a dGPU when you have something like Linux or even Windows as an alternative.
- Melatonic 5mo agoThats also because we keep trying to use terrible interconnects. If we get an interconnect with a proper latency spec things might change
- hacker_mar 5mo ago[dead]
- zer0zzz 5mo agoFWIW, I am partial to eGPUs not for laptop gaming but for space. I want to write cuda kernels at home but I dont want a big tower. I have a Minisforum mini-pc the size of an M4 Mac Mini attached to one of those egpu enclosures and the whole setup was pretty easy and sits on my desk nicely.
- traderj0e 5mo agoYeah the desire makes sense. The Macs are very nice hardware. You can get a mobo/case that's not much larger than the GPU itself, but it's still clunky. It's just, unfortunately eGPUs are unlikely to become more than a curiosity.
- zer0zzz 5mo agoI am definitely enjoying mine, but I've found for what I do some of the hosted kernel writing tools are easier to deal with. I actually had to do a ton of work arounds for my tb5 egpu on Linux recently for it to not drop off the pci bus every ~48 hours.