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Apple to Add Dedicated Video Hardware to Macs?
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And it actually made sense two years ago, when far fewer graphics chipsets included h.264 decoding, much less encoding.
Now that the majority of macs already have hardware that does that, even if it isn't being used by the OS or apps, the rumor doesn't even make sense.
Hopefully with 10.6, OSX will finally start using it.
"Incidentally, H.264 is one of the codecs used in Blu-Ray high definition video discs which Apple has yet to adopt. "
Since when has Apple not included H.264?
Since when has Apple not included H.264?
He's saying that a dedicated processor would IMPROVE playback of H.264, not add it.
I think it was refering to the "Blu-Ray high definition video discs" when it said "which apple has yet to adopt".
Ohhhh, gotcha. I wish these writers would use correct grammar.
The world is becoming increasingly illiterate.
What is wrong with the sentence? It seems correct, "which" immediately followed the object being further described.Ohhhh, gotcha. I wish these writers would use correct grammar.
The world is becoming increasingly illiterate.
OMG!
i know it's not likely but this would just make my day if it were true!
CMON! even a stupid 9200M in a macbook! PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!
i know it's not likely but this would just make my day if it were true!
CMON! even a stupid 9200M in a macbook! PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!
So does this mean Apple thinks that current GPUs aren't powerful enough for the tasks Apple wants, and so wants another accelerator chip?
Or is this just an excuse to put integrated GPUs into as many Macs as possible?
Will the X4500 be able to?
Yep, you are totally correct. I agree with you and the others here that this rumor doesn't make any sense. At this point, full H.264/VC-1 decoding is done by all relatively new discrete GPUs, and now finally on the Intel "Montevina" X4500 integrated graphics chipset.
Encoding on GPUs is still in it's infancy, but nVidia and AMD both support H.264 encoding on their newer cards. As you mentioned, software support is very limited at the moment, although I know there are a few different companies creating updates for their software or plugins for commercial products like Adobe Premiere, After effects, etc that enable H.264 encoding on different GPUs.
So although a small, dedicated H.264 encoding chip would probably outperform all but the most powerful GPUs at the task, there is really no reason to include one. The Macbook and Mini just need a low-end discrete GPU from nVidia or ATI, and they would be capable of both H.264 decoding and encoding acceleration.
Hattig is correct. Here is a chart I made to show video DEcoding acceleration support among ATI, Nvidia, and Intel graphics chipsets:
* All systems below offer MPEG2 decoding support (DVD)
Intel
GMA 950 (pre-Santa Rosa) - NO support for H.264/VC1 decoding.
GMA X3100 (Santa Rosa) - NO support for H.264. Limited support for VC1 decoding.
GMA X4500 (Monevina/future) - Full H.264, Full VC1 decoding.
Nvidia
PureVideo HD 1 - Very limited H.264, Very limited VC1 decoding.
Available on Geforce 7900 and older "G80" based versions of 8800
PureVideo HD 2 - Full H.264 / Partial VC1 decoding.
Available on Geforce 8300, 8400, 8600, 8700, and newer "G92" based 8800 (this includes 8800GT for Mac Pro, and all 8800 laptop cards)
PureVideo HD 3 - Full H.264, Full VC1 decoding.
Available on Introduced with GTX 260/280 (and some newer 9-series models like Geforce 9600GT
ATI/AMD
UVD/UVD+ - Full H.264, Full VC1 decoding. Greater offloading for both codecs than Nvidia's PureVideo 2.
Available on all Geforce 2xxx, 3xxx series
UVD2 - Full H.264/VC1/MPEG2. Adds support for Blu-ray Profile 2.0 / BD-Live, and Picture-in-Picture.
Available on Geforce 4800 series
Thanks for the information!
What? All modern GPUs offer 2D hardware acceleration, which should provide plenty of power for a resolution independent vector GUI. There is no conceivable reason why you would need a dedicated "vector art" accelerating DSP... Am I misinterpreting your point here?
I would like to see this, especially if it can reduce iChat overhead and save some juice. I run iChat for hours on end, producing a fairly hot MacBook Pro in the process. I'd love to see a dedicated encoder that uses less power, or at least creates less heat.
Well said. I would like to use less power too!
It seems fine and made perfect sense to me. I guess people don't want to look like they've been wrong on the internet, it must be the other guy's fault you didn't read it properly...
So does this mean Apple thinks that current GPUs aren't powerful enough for the tasks Apple wants, and so wants another accelerator chip?
Or is this just an excuse to put integrated GPUs into as many Macs as possible?
Probably neither. They can get away with integrated graphics on the cheapest machines, but that's about it.
It's supposed to. Maybe once Apple is using it, they'll finally start taking advantage of h.264 hardware since the whole line will include it.
Discreet Graphics or BUST. Stop being cheap, Apple.
I'd rather have a discreet graphics card as well.
This sounds like an attempt by Apple to once again avoid discreet graphics in the low end prodcts and possibly discontinue their use on the higher end models. Anything to save a buck....
Hey, if they are talking about putting a chip in to handle QT and H.264 duties while freeing up graphics cards for other things, I'm all for it. But if this is another cost-cutting attempt than I am not impressed.
Apple's got over 20 BILLION in cash, not what one would consider "balanced" books. They need to be putting discreet graphics in laptops. Period. And they need to stop buying the previous generation graphics. Apple has always lagged behind in the graphics department. Look at the "announcement" a couple of months ago that the ATI 3870 would be available for the Mac Pro. Big friggin' deal. The 4870 is out, and has been out. Next...
I'd rather have a discreet graphics card as well.
This sounds like an attempt by Apple to once again avoid discreet graphics in the low end prodcts and possibly discontinue their use on the higher end models. Anything to save a buck....
Hey, if they are talking about putting a chip in to handle QT and H.264 duties while freeing up graphics cards for other things, I'm all for it. But if this is another cost-cutting attempt than I am not impressed.
Apple's got over 20 BILLION in cash, not what one would consider "balanced" books. They need to be putting discreet graphics in laptops. Period. And they need to stop buying the previous generation graphics. Apple has always lagged behind in the graphics department. Look at the "announcement" a couple of months ago that the ATI 3870 would be available for the Mac Pro. Big friggin' deal. The 4870 is out, and has been out. Next...
While I agree that Apple should offer the latest graphics chips, I don't see what the big deal is about using integrated graphics on the cheapest models. Especially when PCs are doing the exact same thing.
Blu-Ray is not H.264
Hi Guys;
First off Shamino above, should be given a lot of credit for his insight. There is a lot of legal BS that goes along with implementing Blu-Ray which is likely why Apple has yet to deliver. More importantly people have to realize that Blu-Ray while it may use H.264 is not H.264. It is a very important distinction as you can decode and view H.264 today on Mac Platforms.
Second; there isn't a hardware platform yet that can decode Blue ray on a PC, in every form and extension it supports! With our without GPU acceleration. Sure you can do 1 stream of H.264 with passable quality on many a GPU but Blue-Ray offers up more than that. Still I have to believe that a big motivation for Apple will simply be to deliver a way to offer up Blu-ray content that doesn't screw up the rest of their systems the way MS did.
In some other forums on other sites, there has been a lot of discussion about what Apple could transition to that would offer up the advantage that Apple management alluded to. Many of us think that a specialize processor is part of the plan. Of course we diverge a bit as to what exactly that is. My suggestion is this, that Apple wants and needs a co-processor that is flexible enough to offer up on all its platforms. I'm talking IPod Touch Nano on up. What I see here is a vector processing array that can be scaled depending on the platform it is stuffed into.
So imagine Apple taking a concept that somewhat resembles the vector units in Cell that are optimized to do video decode and other tasks of interest to Apple. A iPod might implement one or two vector units, a Mini 8 and a Mac Pro 32. Each would have exactly the same vector unit, OpenCl would provide the avenue to using the supplied hardware.
Now before everybody flips out about Cell and power usage I will remind everyone that Cell was an IBM designed chip! Here we have PA Semi doing the design with a tremendous amount of low power experience combined with Apples background with Alt-Vec. It should be completely reasonable to expect that such a processor could replace the current decode unit in an iPod without a huge increase in power usage. Do a SOC and the power usage might go down. Give this co-processor the ability to do its own I/O and you have a way to significantly off load the main processor and maintain IP security. Since the processors are more general purpose and hopefully live as a fully equal on the processor bus the alternative uses are unlimited.
Now about that alternative use. Imagine vector code that you write being able to work on both an iPod Touch and a Mac Pro without a rewrite. There certainly would be a speed difference but that is to be expected. The idea is that the main CPU instruction set means very little to you as a developer as you have a universal facility to target or you simply rely on OpenCL.
Now that is raw speculation but if what Apple is hinting at is hardware I see it as a reasonable possibility.
Dave
Hi Guys;
First off Shamino above, should be given a lot of credit for his insight. There is a lot of legal BS that goes along with implementing Blu-Ray which is likely why Apple has yet to deliver. More importantly people have to realize that Blu-Ray while it may use H.264 is not H.264. It is a very important distinction as you can decode and view H.264 today on Mac Platforms.
Second; there isn't a hardware platform yet that can decode Blue ray on a PC, in every form and extension it supports! With our without GPU acceleration. Sure you can do 1 stream of H.264 with passable quality on many a GPU but Blue-Ray offers up more than that. Still I have to believe that a big motivation for Apple will simply be to deliver a way to offer up Blu-ray content that doesn't screw up the rest of their systems the way MS did.
In some other forums on other sites, there has been a lot of discussion about what Apple could transition to that would offer up the advantage that Apple management alluded to. Many of us think that a specialize processor is part of the plan. Of course we diverge a bit as to what exactly that is. My suggestion is this, that Apple wants and needs a co-processor that is flexible enough to offer up on all its platforms. I'm talking IPod Touch Nano on up. What I see here is a vector processing array that can be scaled depending on the platform it is stuffed into.
So imagine Apple taking a concept that somewhat resembles the vector units in Cell that are optimized to do video decode and other tasks of interest to Apple. A iPod might implement one or two vector units, a Mini 8 and a Mac Pro 32. Each would have exactly the same vector unit, OpenCl would provide the avenue to using the supplied hardware.
Now before everybody flips out about Cell and power usage I will remind everyone that Cell was an IBM designed chip! Here we have PA Semi doing the design with a tremendous amount of low power experience combined with Apples background with Alt-Vec. It should be completely reasonable to expect that such a processor could replace the current decode unit in an iPod without a huge increase in power usage. Do a SOC and the power usage might go down. Give this co-processor the ability to do its own I/O and you have a way to significantly off load the main processor and maintain IP security. Since the processors are more general purpose and hopefully live as a fully equal on the processor bus the alternative uses are unlimited.
Now about that alternative use. Imagine vector code that you write being able to work on both an iPod Touch and a Mac Pro without a rewrite. There certainly would be a speed difference but that is to be expected. The idea is that the main CPU instruction set means very little to you as a developer as you have a universal facility to target or you simply rely on OpenCL.
Now that is raw speculation but if what Apple is hinting at is hardware I see it as a reasonable possibility.
Dave
Sigh... I too want a 720p iSight but theres a problem...
...the problem is called ISP asshats. With what for example Comcast gives you (45KB up) you can't even stream 640x480 in full quality - ever see what you get on the other end? Blurry blurry crap.
Problem isn't with the quality of the webcams as it is w/ the service to transfer that video...
I mean it doesn't matter if Apple throws in a 1080p 3CCD camera in place of an iSight, the quality on the other end won't change...
The second Cringely article (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080801_005339.html) talks about this. The chips do compression also so it may be possible. I've been able to stream 640x480 in Skype before with quality video under 25KB/s. There are other factors that can affect a connection other than your ISP.
I'd rather have a discrete graphics card in the Macbook (maybe the 8600?) and a better card on the MBP (8800?).
Well, if they manage to do that without making the laptop work as George Foreman Grill while decoding video.
YESSS
Maybe the $20 billion is for future iPhone development.
My guess is that they're doing what MS did with their stash and save it for the various lawsuits that arise from being a monopoly. Don't be fooled like some others because Apple certainly is a monopoly in the music industry so they're a prime target like MS has been.
The only one actually talking about h.264 hardware is Cringeley. I'd just like to say that dedicated h.264 _to free up graphics cards for other things_ is quite pointless. h.264 = watching videos. You don't play any 3d games while watching video. The only good reason for h.264 hardware would be power savings.
There are lots of people (like me) who have no need for anything better than integrated graphics. It handles everything fine that I need it for. Others have different needs, but I don't want to pay more for their needs.Apple's got over 20 BILLION in cash, not what one would consider "balanced" books. They need to be putting discreet graphics in laptops. Period. And they need to stop buying the previous generation graphics. Apple has always lagged behind in the graphics department. Look at the "announcement" a couple of months ago that the ATI 3870 would be available for the Mac Pro. Big friggin' deal. The 4870 is out, and has been out. Next...
However, Apple is planning further ahead anyway. And Apple is really best buddies with Intel. And Intel has a new chip on its way that is at the same time a powerful engine for a graphics card and at the same time perfectly useful for high performance computing. And Apple is right now developing both the software to use many cores easily, and to use graphics hardware. I could see a laptop chip containing a single Core2 core plus two or four Larrabee cores, which would give you a combination that is reasonably low power, faster than current laptops for normal task, has good graphics power and beats a current MacPro with specialised software.
Apple is such a big monopoly in the music industry, they cannot even force the record companies to give Apple a license to sell DRM-free music. A monopoly is in a position to say "You do as you're told or else...". Apple is nowhere near that position.
I'd rather have a discreet graphics card as well.
This sounds like an attempt by Apple to once again avoid discreet graphics in the low end prodcts and possibly discontinue their use on the higher end models. Anything to save a buck....
Hey, if they are talking about putting a chip in to handle QT and H.264 duties while freeing up graphics cards for other things, I'm all for it. But if this is another cost-cutting attempt than I am not impressed.
I seriously doubt it's a cost cutting move unless they've brought in executives from the early 90's back to Apple to make decisions like this. If anything the Apple of today is more about distinguishing or protecting themselves. They cannot win in a price war so they have to come up with angles and promote those. Honestly though I don't put anything into this rumor.
If true though, it sounds more like the Apple of old where they came out with a Mac model that had a dsp chip coupled in the system with a 68040. Many were interested in it but it didn't hang around long as processors soon came out where the dsp was no longer needed and the processors were cheaper. Not to mention that it was easier for developers to write for the processor than the dsp in the first place.
People need to remember that this is all rumor so getting excited about it good or bad really is just setting youself up later.
If I were to rumor about chips, I would be thinking hard about chips that allow Apple to truly tie the OS to their hardware as far as Macs are concerned.
Apple's got over 20 BILLION in cash, not what one would consider "balanced" books. They need to be putting discreet graphics in laptops. Period. And they need to stop buying the previous generation graphics. Apple has always lagged behind in the graphics department. Look at the "announcement" a couple of months ago that the ATI 3870 would be available for the Mac Pro. Big friggin' deal. The 4870 is out, and has been out. Next...
Apple has done this since....forever. I wouldn't expect that to change now. Honestly I don't think it's so much a cost issue as creating the drivers constantly to keep up. In the end cost is an issue with this but the common thought is regarding chip costs. One needs to consider that developing drivers has a cost as well. And before someone mentions on the pc side where a single driver seems to support everything, that's not always the case. Many times than can be merely a package that contains multiple drivers or driver configurations depending on the hardware.
Long ago though I had a thought that one day if Apple was perceived "cool" enough that they might be able to sell a premium game system(Alienware comes to mind as an example) that was Mac based where they did have the latest blazing video card. In that case it would be a chicken/egg thing though where game developers are going to want to see the marketshare potential in order to bring games over to the Mac.
...after thinking a bit more...I would be curious to see if between this and comments and rumors regarding the product transition that Apple has mentioned over the next quarter if perhaps it really is about Macs. I don't think I've read or heard anyone mention the Apple TV yet. Apple might be looking to improve it with this and maybe give it a little more punch.