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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

That's less true than it once was. Both that the console APIs abstract way more of the systems than they once did so that console manufacturers can do perf refreshes halfway through the cycle, and that the whole point of Vulkan, et al. is to bring console like programming techniques to full computers since the GPU's MMU means that all you'll do is crash your own process anyway. That all adds up to them needing pretty nice hardware to keep up.

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I dont see how this helps Apple to compete with AMD or Nvidia GPUe. It's much easier for Apple to just use AMD GPUs for their Pro devices. Macs market is just too small to create custom high-end GPUs.

Apple might have huge leverage on mobile with iPhone because Android graphics drivers are horrible mess, but on Windows GPU drivers are decent and building custom driver stack sounds like too much.

I mean, it's not like the consoles are very custom GPUs. They were pretty standard GCN last gen, and pretty standard RDNA this new gen.

Apple's custom GPUs they use in their SoCs are arguably more effort on their part.

Why wouldn't Apple just reuse everything, including graphics hardware and drivers from iOS?

I guess because one can't just reuse hardware. They cant just take iPhone GPU, make it 5 times bigger and get 5X more performance with 5X of power budget. So more likely they'll just gonna sell laptops with GPU performance closer to iPhone which is not at all impressive.

GPU is actually relatively easier to scale by adding more cores/ALUs. The difficulty lies in figuring out how to handle peak current requirement of the whole IP.

> Both that the console APIs abstract way more of the systems than they once did

And PC graphics APIs abstract way less of the system than they once did

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