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MP 7,1 Apple Afterburner Card Teardown
- Thread starter Zhi
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- afterburner mac pro 2019
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The whole purpose of that chip is to build a software circuitry, to mimic a specific specialised chip design before it exists.
So there is no direct link between the size of the reprogrammable chip, and the specialised chip design.
Apple did what Apple usually does. It offered no further usage of this card, despite it being built as a general development tool. Which kind of defeats the purpose of this kind of chips.
This teardown is great 👍 Because it identifies what chip is actually used. First time I have seen it.
The Xilinx chips are mentioned in a thread discussing AMD proposal of an FPGA user interface for Linux.
Links from past searches I have done
www.theregister.com
So there is no direct link between the size of the reprogrammable chip, and the specialised chip design.
Apple did what Apple usually does. It offered no further usage of this card, despite it being built as a general development tool. Which kind of defeats the purpose of this kind of chips.
This teardown is great 👍 Because it identifies what chip is actually used. First time I have seen it.
The Xilinx chips are mentioned in a thread discussing AMD proposal of an FPGA user interface for Linux.
Links from past searches I have done
AMD's latest FPGA promises lower latency stock trading bots
Letting more advanced ML loose on the stock market? What could possibly go wrong?
Xilinx XCKU15P-2VIVE1517E Datasheet | View Xilinx XCKU15P-2VIVE1517E FPGAs - Field Programmable Gate Arrays Datasheets - Octopart
View and download the latest Xilinx XCKU15P-2VIVE1517E Datasheet including technical specifications, product features, and more from Octopart. Download datasheet PDF files and view the best pricing for Xilinx XCKU15P-2VIVE1517E FPGAs - Field Programmable Gate Arrays now!
octopart.com
I wonder if these can be reprogrammed from software on the Mac. That's a pretty generic FGPA that.
Those FPGAs are relatively old process. Also FGPAs aren't exactly space efficient on die.
They were supposed to before Apple killed off the Mac Pro basically and MPX cards.
I'm aware what an FPGA is lol
My point was that it's very cool they embed it in the ARM chips now.
And can you program that particular thing on the ARM chip to do whatever you want it to do, in the way it was originally planned for the Afterburner card.
I already know the answer, absolutely not, Apple knows best what you want to do all the time... Sigh.
I am so sad Apple never let programmers reprogram this for other usages. FPGAs are cool from perspective of someone who is illiterate when it comes to hardware like that or embedded development in general. I wonder if these could be reverse engineered at some point (with gargantuan effort I presume)
The afterburner required a notarised (Apple only) updater, and IIRC a reboot - here was only ever 1 update issued for it, again IIRC.
It wasn't an on-the-fly thing, far more akin to updating the OS in the T2 chip.
If that is the case. Why haven't the Linux community taking advantage of it and developed open source code to reprogram them? After all, it uses standard PCI-e slot. And the cards are very cheap these days.
I have not seen any hint in that direction.
Don't think anyone cares about Apple in those communities haha
plus its a discontinued product
Unless the XCKU15P FFVA1156AAZ just happens to be exactly what your your design needs (and it is big), it would be far cheaper to get one of many other (smaller) FPGAs best suited to your design and program those.
There isn’t much computing going on on like 90% of the entire thing.
I recently watched a video of snazzylabs I think where he broke it down quickly, I think his most recent Mac Pro video. Modern MacBooks have much more processing power than multiple of these afterburners.
They added multiple ProRes and ProRes RAW encoders/decoders streams to the M chips many generations ago...which is what the Afterburner card was doing. And of course it has H264/H265/AV1
And what would be the point of that?
1st you would need a usecase that can't be done just as well or better with a current CPU or GPU.
2nd you would need a big enough user base that give a #### about it.
3rd you need to actually do it in a way that can be easily reproduced by potential users.
At this point you may just as well start with something from this list.
