Apple Removing Support for AMD GPUs in macOS Arm64 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Removing Support for AMD GPUs in macOS Arm64

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That's a bummer for e-GPU users. It was a small niche but seemed like a very promising one

Just when Linux kernel drivers for AMD GPU are actually becoming good. I know I won't purchase Mac the moment they becomes ARM-only.

That’s not what that slide means.

I think Apple's move to Arm64 will make Hakintosh community get in deep trouble, and possibly newer devices sale for Apple's mac lines.

I think the community consensus (if /r/Hackintosh is at all representative) can be summarised as "well, we had a good run".

Still I think, It will survive. The shift will take at least 3-4 years, even after that the Apple will likely support older architecture for at least more 3-4 year(like switch to Intel from powerpc). There are also chances of a emulation based solution to run newer Arm64 apps to current mac computers, because it is most likely not possible for every developer to re-develop the apps.

This buffer of multiple years will also help enthusiastic individuals/hacker time to do research an break newer mechanism of hardware lock for os. ultimately, I think It will survive but with some road-blocks.

and in my opinion, if someone is trying to build hackintosh for now, he should gracefully proceed. as current system is at least expected to work for next 5years.

Isn’t this just a very early engineering release? Apple may just not yet support all the PCI Express bus stuff required to make GPU hardware work.

I’m most curious about whether Thunderbolt will continue being supported given that’s basically an Intel Kool-Aid standard. We may have some very disappointed Pro Display XDR owners soon.

Don't worry, in that case Apple could release a new display with some other connector to replace the old XDR's. Stand connector is kind of old too.

It isn’t just the display connection. If you have 5k or 8k display, there’s no way Apples SOC GPU is going to compete with an RTX 30x0 or RDNA2 GPU.

Not supporting eGPUs sucks, but the coming death of Hackintoshes is kind of worse, and it seems like the Mac ARM era will make any kind of hacking around OSX difficult.

no more OSX running in a container with passthrough NVIDIA GPU on your Linux box under qemu

>We may have some very disappointed Pro Display XDR owners soon.

It works on Macbook 12" and iPad [1], it works over DisplayPort. [2] Although you do need TB3 for native 6K support.

Pro Display XDR requires a GPU capable of supporting DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression (DSC) and Forward Error Correction (FEC), or a GPU supporting DisplayPort 1.4 with HBR3 link rate and Thunderbolt Titan Ridge for native 6K resolution. If multiple displays are being used with the same Mac, each display can be configured independently for settings such as reference modes and orientation.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/16/ipad-pro-works-with-pro-displ...

[2] https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/pdf/Pro_Display_White_...

TB3 is an optional part of the USB4 spec.

It's very likely that Apple will support USB4/TB3.

Screwing around with ports is what Apple does best.

Apple has signalled for a couple of years that they’re not really interested in supporting eGPUs, so no real surprise there.

But I’d be very surprised if they dropped TB, considering it’s the superior standard at the moment and USB4 is still not done (afaik). I’m sure they know it well enough to make it work even with non-Intel hardware.

I guess that leaves Apple GPU and Intel GPU drivers.

Hypothetical ARM Hackintosh users are going to have a hard time and won't be able to rely on AMD GPUs without some sort of emulation or virtualization layer.

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