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Comment by cududa | Hacker News Reader

“ Apple shows it as being roughly the same size as the M2 processor in the Vision Pro marketing[3], indicating it's a peer to the M2”

Errr, that’s not how this works. The size of them being similar means absolutely nothing.

The R1 is a coprocessor, I mean it’s basically a big signal processor with a decent amount of RAM to handle all the camera inputs, and does some GPU like stuff, but isn’t a GPU

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The R1 has a lot of memory bandwidth. According to this article at Tom's Hardware[0], the M2 has 68 GB/s of memory bandwidth. So the R1 has several times that at 256GB/s. Coincidentally (or not), that is similar to the discrete Nvidia and AMD GPUs they compare the M2 against in that article.

I know discrete GPU comparable memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean it's discrete GPU or a peer to the M2, but there's clearly a lot of something going on. Plus isn't it kinda weird to specifically mention a spec that is applicable to programmable devices like CPUs or GPUs on a signal processor? Like, who cares?

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m2-gpu-analysis

M1 was 68GB/s (and the article says this too).

M2 was 100GB/s.

You're right, my mistake.

Apple likes mentioning whatever is a competitive advantage. M2 has 100GB/s, M2 Pro 200GB/s. They put in the bandwidth they think is needed for the purpose. Likewise with the 12 camera interfaces. It’s a safe bet that there’s some sort of GPU on board but there’s zero indication that this is Apples first discrete GPU. If anything you would expect such a chip to appear first in a desktop product. The R1 is likely programmable as well.

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