Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Apple showed a lineup of compatible PCIe cards, with a variety of accelerators and I/O hardware but conspicuously no GPUs.

https://i.imgur.com/28J1KfN.jpg

The Apple Silicon transition ended support for external GPUs, so I think it's safe to assume they won't support internal ones either.

View on HN

> conspicuously no GPUs

That is interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to do PCI passthrough to enable GPUs to work with Windows 11 ARM running in a VM?

I wonder if it is even possible to write a driver for an external GPU for macOS on Apple Silicon? It seems that Metal on macOS Sonoma intel still supports external GPUs.

I guess (although, I don’t actually know, low level stuff is confusing) this is an OS thing, right? Rather than hardware. Of course since it is Apple, the concept is bundled together anyway. But I wonder if Asahi Linux could bring support?

Man I'm so out of what's going on with desktop computing lol, feeling old

Could somebody explain what these are?

Expansion cards, they were supported by the original PC from the 80s and even before that.

I'm not that old lol, was wondering specifically what they were

As you can see they're still a thing, so you could be any age from 0-60.

left to right, had to search a few of them. You're probably not out of it, it's just relatively niche professional stuff. Half of them are only relevant for media professionals for example.

Sonnet card - adds storage via a couple SATA SSDs

OWC 8M2 - adds storage via up to 8 NVME drives

Avid HDX card, runs DSP for ProTools (audio)

Kona 5, video capture and I/O

Lynx E44, high-quality audio I/O

Blackmagic decklink SDI 4k - SDI video capture

ATTO high-speed ethernet card, maybe 50GbE

ATTO Celerity Fibre Channel Adapter - Storage HBA

edit to add linebreaks

Nice thankyou!

The product page specifically touts the Radeon Pro W6800X Duo.

The product page hasn't been updated yet, it's still describing the Intel model.

If it were current then they'd have something newer than the years-old W6800X Duo.

Sorry, you're right. I thought I saw a mention of an M2 spec, but it must have been something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com