Apple Partnered with Blackmagic Design on an External GPU for MacBooks | Hacker News Reader

Apple Partnered with Blackmagic Design on an External GPU for MacBooks

techcrunch.com

14 pointsplg12 comments

Hopefully it wont overheat like many of Blackmagic Design's products.

Considering it is larger than some mini PCs with 1080s in them I'd really hope not.

Source? I use ATEM, router, dozens of their converters & decklinks often and haven’t had heat problems, but am operating indoors.

My video conference rig is a Micro Studio Camera 4K, Video Assist 4k, and Arduino shield all going into a Decklink card on an Ubuntu desktop machine. The Studio Camera, Video Assist and Arduino shield all get pretty hot, so I don't run them continuously. The Video Assist does weird things when it's hot like having the audio meters stop working, even though it's still transmitting audio to the SDI output just fine.

That said, the Decklink has been rock-solid in the 5+ years I've owned it and we had a VideoHub at a past workplace that worked great. I actually recommend all the Blackmagic stuff I've worked with, but have seen heat consistently been an issue.

Or all of Apple's products. ;(

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17520085

> Apple announced external GPU support at last year’s WWDC, finally rolling out support for the feature back in March.

I'm surprised. I guess I'd always assumed that they'd already implemented that for the trash-can Mac Pro. IIRC, one of the selling points was thunderbolt was so fast that card slots were obsolete, so if you needed to upgrade the GPU you could just use thunderbolt.

Netkas (netkas.org) spent years getting non-Apple GPUs and eGPUs working on Macs with varying levels of success.

I flashed a PC Radeon to work on my Mac Pro 1,1 with help from the Netkas forums sometime around 2010.

Thunderbolt’s licensing cost and high price point of external PCie breakouts are the adoption bottleneck IMO.

Initially, yes. Later this year or next year, Thunderbolt will be an open royalty-free non-exclusive format.

Source: Intel: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunder...

Once it is opened up, it should in theory drop the prices with more companies being able to product TB chipsets.

So what is the compatibility of this with non-Macs?

Or even on a mac Bootcamp OS such as Windows 8/10?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com