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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

It was already a dire situation running a Mac with eGPU or a Hackintosh even before the RTX 30-series announcement, and much more dire after that.

The likeliness of Apple allowing NVIDIA to produce Mac drivers again is close to zero. It’d be nice for AMD to be able to compete with GPUs again.

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Apple Silicon will contain an Apple-designed GPU, so it might soon be irrelevant for Mac users what AMD has to offer.

Apple's GPUs achieve "integrated" level performance and it would be a large step for them to achieve AMD or nvidia performance levels. Maybe they can scale it up sufficiently, or put it on a separate die with its own heat dissipation, but that seems like biting off too mcuh.

My MBP has the intel integrated graphics, and AMD discrete graphics. I imagine as Apple moves to Apple silicon it will be the same arrangement at tiers that currently have discrete graphics, with the intel integrated just being swapped out for Apple integrated, leveraging the discrete graphics when appropriate.

Given the performance of iPad Pro graphics, I could easily see the Apple GPU being competitive with AMD’s graphics in thermally constrained scenarios.

I highly suspect Apple will still ship (and support) AMD GPUs - maybe for the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. I doubt that Apple Silicon GPUs will be close to the performance to AMD/NVidias flagships. And I assume the market share for iMac/Mac Pro is just not that big for Apple to invest in competing with AMD/Nvidia on the Highend Segment.

OTOH Apple also needs dedicated GPUs for some of their MBPs and the bigger iMacs.

I think they will end up ditching AMD to have 100% E2E control on all their products.

Apple's MBP drivers have been broken since 2016 and getting worse, high-frequency locked and thereby thermally throttling the CPU at idle. I don't know if that means Apple Silicon will be better or if they are just incompetent at it.

I can also easily imagine AMD in the Mac Pro, but only as an accelerator rather than to drive displays.

(And I’m also predicting Apple will have more FPGA programs ready for the Afterburner card. This accelerator may even be the distinguishing feature of a future iMac Pro.)

>And I assume the market share for iMac/Mac Pro is just not that big for Apple to invest in competing with AMD/Nvidia on the Highend Segment.

Well it is the same argument for CPU as well. Shipment volume dont make much sense for a Custom CPU in those TDP.

But it really seems they are going All in. Custom CPU, GPU and likely NPU on all of their platform.

What do you even do with a GPU on a Mac these days? I guess there are a decent amount of games now, but it seems like it'd be mostly limited to "creative" stuff since CUDA is out of the question.

Imagine how much more dire it's going to get once Apple has ditched Intel. Are they going to continue using third-party, discrete GPUs? You definitely won't be able to use one off the shelf (at least without flashing the card's BIOS)

You do GPU-accelerated 3D rendering. [1]

You do GPU-accelerated video editing. [2]

You do GPU-accelerated machine learning. [3]

[1] https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/

[2] https://www.apple.com/de/final-cut-pro/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10677/

You need to watch youtube these days.

Intel integrated GPU has a huge downside in laptops - offloading to it causes it to heat up and since, so close to the CPU...CPU gets heavily thermal throttled. That's true for any laptop that isn't inch or more thiccc.

Also, Apple will be switching to their own GPU in a few years.

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