Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

This is speculation, but I’m betting that we will see a GPU-backed external display (sort of an iMac minus the Mac) sometime in the next year. Apple never builds out support like this unless they plan on having a product to sell.

And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

View on HN

It could happen, but from Apple's own announcements it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development, which Tim Cook constantly tells us (for AR at least...) is something he's super excited about for the future of computing. Not arguing this is the sole reason, but it definitely seems like a feature to cover high end edge cases like this for the time being.

Much of Apple's own discussions on the eGPU feature at WWDC/the marketing blurb for their own eGPU devkit refer to VR a lot too. Apple added VR support to Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time as well.

> And they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

Not so sure I'd agree with this - every single Titanium PowerBook model ever made had a discrete GPU. Even the iBooks had dedicated GPUs. It wasn't until the adoption of Intel processors that integrated GPUs was even an option for Apple really.

>It could happen, but from Apple's own announcements it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development, which Tim Cook constantly tells us (for AR at least...) is something he's super excited about for the future of computing.

Because it is. High end AR/VR is exclusively DirectX Wintel 64 based. There's pretty much no exception except for the toy implementation of things like Samsung Gear. Google abandoned Tango, and Daydream is on life support. Apple's ecosystem will remain irrelevant until they release their own hardware.

For software sure. VR video content production is still a thing as well though, and plenty of video creators use Apple platforms. I imagine it was no accident FCP gained VR support shortly after the eGPU support announcement.

The iPhone is their AR hardware.

And where do you develop and compile apps for those iPhones? ;)

On a 15” screen with cruddy video card options. And apparently it’s on your lap too.

Or on a 27in 5k display iMac.

It's very pricey, but Apple sells an 18-Core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon W in an iMac with a 27" 5K display and a Vega 64 GPU, and up to 128GB of 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory.

So while that is not a cheap option, Apple does sell powerful hardware. That's a decent AR dev machine, surely.

In the PowerPC days, they didn't really even have the option of an integrated GPU though. Even Intel's GPU that was integrated into the north bridge didn't come along until 98. And it was more of a cheap option for desktop fleets rather than a power conscious chip for laptops.

oops, you are correct

I'm skeptical of relying on eGPUs for high end VR. TB3 can easily choke the GPU and cause stuttering/framedrops, and missing any frames in VR is a recipe for nausea.

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/External-Graphi...

>> it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development

As well as ML development, which is a pain w/o a local CUDA-compliant GPU. Yes, you could do it on the cloud, but sometimes it is easier to do ad-hoc stuff locally without having to spin up GPU machines and remember to spin them down.

Ding ding ding.

I use OS X for all software development except CUDA at the moment. This is huge.

isn't lambda/cloud function/server-less the suitable alternative for that pain point ?

If Tim Cook is actually concerned about the Mac being marginalized for AR/VR, he'd get a lot more bang for his buck out of not treating OpenGL and Vulcan like the red-headed stepchildren on macOS.

All middleware that matters on VR space also supports Metal.

"... it seems like they were worried that the Mac was increasingly marginalized as a platform for AR/VR development ..."

If, by "worried", you mean: they went out of their way to smite and thrash the organic core of their customer base, ignored their most basic requests, and deleted five years from their product lifecycle (nobody used the trashcan mac pro) ... then yes, I suppose they might be worried.

Maybe they noticed how many copies of High Sierra are running on firmware-modded 2009/2010 mac pros ?

Nah , I think this is one of the best solutions as is. I have a MacBook Pro 13 that I carry around with me for software development. I also have a basic AMD 2600 G setup with a GTX650 for gaming . I only game at home or do deep learning. These thunderbolt systems do exactly what I want . Get rid of the need for an extra computer . I am thinking of selling the system and then buying one of the recommended systems .

This. My hope when I saw the Surface Pro 3 was that the middling eGPU (Thunderbolt 2) thing going on with Macbook Pros would eventually make its way to the Surface Pro line where the Surface pro essentially becomes a hub and it could be the tablet/gaming console-pc/desktop I had hoped.

At this point, I'm just waiting on an updated MacBook Pro 15in (ready to buy in again, but too far into the current MBP product cycle. Might as well wait it out) and that Sonnet box and calling it a day.

I bought a dev kit when they became available, hoping to move my gaming from my 10-year-old PC to my 15" MBPr. What I figured out was that, despite the graphics performance being great, I was still hampered by the fact that the AAA games available on the Mac are still just Windows ports. Civ V and VI ran smooth to scroll around the screen, even at high detail and resolution, but actually performing the actions, and waiting for the computer to process the AI players' turns, was abysmal.

Against everything I hold right and proper, I installed Windows 10 with Boot Camp. I only ever got the external display to work once, and couldn't repeat it.

I wound up just moving the RX580 to my aging PC as an upgrade.

I REALLY want to live in this world, but it's going to take natively-developed games to get there. But hey, they're coming. I'm buying them, and, often, not even playing them; just trying to send the message.

> Apple never builds out support like this unless they plan on having a product to sell.

Developers have been starting to leave the platform because there aren't any MBPs that can be used to create VR content. While I agree that they will likely release something, their hand was also forced here.

Not all developers care about VR, and Apple OS never were much relevant on CAD or gaming development anyway, other than those targeting iOS devices.

For those devices, even current hardware is good enough. It is no point being able to produce VR with a level of detail that an iPhone is not able to cope with.

> Apple OS never were much relevant on CAD

“Development of ArchiCAD started in 1982 for the original Apple Macintosh.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiCAD

Relevant in money, market share, not what started on the Mac.

Excel was also released initially on the Mac.

And well before that viscalc was a big selling point for Apple ][ 's back in the day.

> Developers have been starting to leave the platform because there aren't any MBPs that can be used to create VR content.

Developers have also been leaving the platform because they can’t buy a Mac laptop with physical function keys without making other performance sacrifices.

In many ways, the display is a more sensible place for it. This could be a good thing long as they make the GPU component replaceable. There is such a high difference between the expected lifespan of an upmarket display and a performant GPU.

they seem to generally "dislike" putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

The Tibook g4 had a discrete GPU. Not having one wasn't even an option until Intel's integrated doodads got good enough.

> I’m betting that we will see a GPU-backed external display

Does iOS show any signs of supporting external GPUs?

It would be great! My question is: Is it possible to have a GPU-backed external display and charge the laptop simultaneously with one wire?

Since thats the case today with eGPU thunderbolt 3 docks I would assume so.

Yes. I do exactly this today with a 1080ti in an Akitio Node Pro. Unfortunately NVIDIA cards still aren’t supported properly though, so my laptop crashes if I pull the thunderbolt cable out. I’m hoping this stuff gets ironed out over the next year or two - it’s a great solution otherwise.

PowerPC Macs never had "integrated" GPU's. If they didn't have a discrete chip they just had a dumb frame buffer.

While I find your prediction very plausible I could also imagine them just wanting to support 3rd party accessories.

Or an Augmented Reality / Vr headset with AirPods support.

aren't they completely out of the stand-alone display business now?

Not for long, probably thanks in part to the total shitshow that was/is LG's TB3 display.

"As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year [2017]; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do."

https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

I've been making the same guess for years now.

Ever since hwtools (supplier of expresscard/mini pcie breakout boards) said they were not allowed to release a thunderbolt version, it was clear to me that this generation, the dma-exposing peripheral interface was finally meant for external graphics processing. And who, oh who could be the prime customer?

... Who seems to have the slowest product pipeline in the world, blocking technology adoption for years?

Not too many candidates :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com