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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The Vega 48 GPU seems disappointing for a machine that expensive.

Agree, I would want at least a Vega 64 for that amount of money (Or even a Radeon VII!). But then Apple has to think about cooling inside the small chassis, so they might not have a choice. (They managed to fix a Vega 64X in the iMac Pro, but the Pro lineup has different thermal management than the normal one)

It seems crazy to me that Apple compromised the cooling solution of their desktop machine to save 5mm of thickness. Does anyone outside of Apple's marketing department care about the thickness of their desktop machine as long as it is below an inch or two?

We're not the target audience. For programmers, developers etc, Apple has the Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro has not been updated since Dec 2013.

Yea, I agree. I'm pretty sure you could just plug in a Radeon VII as an eGPU, however. I've also heard that NVIDIA cards can work as eGPUs as well.

true. OTOH, an eGPU would be connected by Thunderbolt 3, which offers basically the same max communication speed as 4 PCIe lanes.

and so i wonder: at what point does that communication speed limit the performance of such a set up? why do people normally plug high end graphics cards into a x16 slot? how good a GPU should be used in an eGPU housing before it's a waste of money? etc

Depends on what you're doing. For playing games you're going to be getting a fair bit of texture pop and stutter. For machine learning you might be totally fine.

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