Do you think Apple will ditch AMD for the upcoming Apple Silicon Mac Pro?

[theMarble]

In the upcoming M1X-based MacBook Pro's, it is known at this point that Apple will be using a custom 16-32 core GPU for graphics compared to the Navi chips in the Intel 16". Currently, Apple is selling the Mac Pro 2019 with AMD graphics cards, do you think this will change with Apple Silicon? Will they stay with AMD? Will they ditch them? Will they have both?

What do you guys think?

 

[Gnattu]

It is just too early to even speculate that. It seems like Apple does not show any interest to port AMD GPU drivers to arm64 at the moment and they are making some Metal features that is only available in Apple designed GPUs (for now). Apple's GPU design works very well for power-constrained systems, but they have not made any chip for a device with an 'unleashed' power budget like the Mac Pro. If they are doing well and their GPU works great at multiple hundred watt and delivers a competing performance they may ditch AMD, but if it does not, they may instead port the AMD GPU driver. Having both can also be an option if their own solution only works till a certain point and they still need better performance.

If we just looking at what they are currently doing, I would say that they are trying their best to move to their own in-house solution.

 

[elvisimprsntr]

M1's currently support PCIe 4. My guess is the entire iMac lineup will ditch third party graphics card due to thermal/packaging constraints. It's theoretically possible a new M1(X) Mac Pro could support third party graphics, but the question is would there be any performance benefit over the on package GPUs and unified memory?

 

[Strider64]

I think Apple eventually will as the savings in costs would be a lot if they can control what goes into their computers. It's probably a mute point right now considering it took Apple a long time to update the Mac Pro the last time they did.

 

[diamond.g]

In the upcoming M1X-based MacBook Pro's, it is known at this point that Apple will be using a custom 16-32 core GPU for graphics compared to the Navi chips in the Intel 16". Currently, Apple is selling the Mac Pro 2019 with AMD graphics cards, do you think this will change with Apple Silicon? Will they stay with AMD? Will they ditch them? Will they have both?

What do you guys think?

Every system that Apple uses their own GPU's on will drop support for external (to SOC) GPU's as it goes against the unified memory architecture they have cultivated with their own silicon.

The is me basically parroting @leman (based on what we have seen so far I agree with the assessment).

 

[leman]

M1's currently support PCIe 4. My guess is the entire iMac lineup will ditch third party graphics card due to thermal/packaging constraints. It's theoretically possible a new M1(X) Mac Pro could support third party graphics, but the question is would there be any performance benefit over the on package GPUs and unified memory?

Even more than performance concerns, third-party graphics would break Apple's neat and consistent Apple Silicon GPU programming model. It's very unlikely that Apple would want to invest resources into implementing something that will sabotage their platform in the long run.

 

[Juraj22]

YES, they will drop AMD. Finally.

 

[jmho]

It's going to be really interesting to see if Apple eventually releases their own eGPUs.

I think AMD are definitely on their way out, and I'm mostly fine with that, but I thought the fact you could connect 3+ eGPUs to a 16" MacBook and make an insane rendering machine that could compete with a Mac Pro was incredibly cool.

eGPUs really felt like the future, and I had hoped that as thunderbolt bandwidth increased running a laptop with an eGPU would eventually become a true desktop replacement.

 

[MrGunny94]

Dgpu? For sure, I am curious about their long term strategy for the eGPUs tho..

 

[leman]

I am curious about their long term strategy for the eGPUs tho..

For now, the long term strategy is "no eGPUs"

 

[CMMChris]

I wouldn't be too sure about that. It's very likely that once the big Mac Pro moves to Apple Silicon they will also be offering dedicated GPUs of their own in form of MPX modules. Those would probably also be usable in some eGPU case, given that someone is offering an eGPU case with MPX support. Or as an alternative they could team up with some manufacturer like Blackmagic for a fully integrated eGPU solution as they did in the past for the Radeon 580 Pro.

 

[diamond.g]

I wouldn't be too sure about that. It's very likely that once the big Mac Pro moves to Apple Silicon they will also be offering dedicated GPUs of their own in form of MPX modules. Those would probably also be usable in some eGPU case, given that someone is offering an eGPU case with MPX support. Or as an alternative they could team up with some manufacturer like Blackmagic for a fully integrated eGPU solution as they did in the past for the Radeon 580 Pro.

Would the MPX modules be seen as completely separate (NUMA?) nodes? As it stands how Apple Silicon is packaged/works would go against having external GPU's, since it breaks the unified memory model.

 

[jmho]

I think we're still probably at least 5+ years out until Apple can even think about getting rid of other memory models, aka dropping Metal support for all Intel Macs.

Also it's quite possible that Apple would want to keep the old memory model around just because it would make things easier for "pro" workloads that aren't as dependent on features or latency, and just want to be able to do a lot of highly parallel computing.

I could see Apple GPUs diverging into very powerful iGPUs that are excellent for gaming and good at compute, and extensible eGPUs / MPX modules that are less good for gaming, but excellent at compute.

Moving absolutely everything to the unified model is going to basically guarantee that the Mac Pro is un-upgradeable.

 

[killawat]

As soon as Apple can offer RX580+ performance in all workloads via Mx GPUs then I think a lot of people will be switching to get rid of eGPU dependence. (and then sell the RX580 for silly prices to recoup some of the m1 cost)

 

[CWallace]

In the upcoming M1X-based MacBook Pro's, it is known at this point that Apple will be using a custom 16-32 core GPU for graphics compared to the Navi chips in the Intel 16". Currently, Apple is selling the Mac Pro 2019 with AMD graphics cards, do you think this will change with Apple Silicon? Will they stay with AMD? Will they ditch them? Will they have both?

What do you guys think?

Bloomberg has reported that they believe the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will offer 64 and 128 core GPU options (along with 20 and 40 core CPU options) so I could see Apple dropping third-party OEM GPU options. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro is also expected to be in a "mini-tower" configuration so it might not even offer the space for an MPX slot.

 

[killawat]

Bloomberg has reported that they believe the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will offer 64 and 128 core GPU options (along with 20 and 40 core CPU options) so I could see Apple dropping third-party OEM GPU options. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro is also expected to be in a "mini-tower" configuration so it might not even offer the space for an MPX slot.

The fabled Apple Mac Pro Mini. Would be a dream come true.

 

[fuchsdh]

It's going to be really interesting to see if Apple eventually releases their own eGPUs.

I think AMD are definitely on their way out, and I'm mostly fine with that, but I thought the fact you could connect 3+ eGPUs to a 16" MacBook and make an insane rendering machine that could compete with a Mac Pro was incredibly cool.

eGPUs really felt like the future, and I had hoped that as thunderbolt bandwidth increased running a laptop with an eGPU would eventually become a true desktop replacement.

I dunno if they felt like "the future", but they did feel like you could run around with a more portable client and not lose much or anything in the process. Slap your MBP onto a Thunderbolt dock and an eGPU and you get a lot more oomph and all the ports you could need, while keeping the portability, and especially given Apple's reticence to ship a slotbox it offered a nice way to customize your product. My Mac mini is a good machine turned to a great one with a beefier eGPU, and under normal circumstances even TB3 bandwidth doesn't massively degrade performance. I really hope we see eGPU stuff return to AS.

Given the effort Apple made into developing eGPU support and then the MPX module and the Mac Pro platform after it was clear internally they already knew they were skating to AS, it seems a little weird to me they'd just drop external GPUs entirely, especially since at the high end it allows them to not spend time dwelling on it and just drop in whatever AMD's cooking up.

 

[leman]

I could see Apple GPUs diverging into very powerful iGPUs that are excellent for gaming and good at compute, and extensible eGPUs / MPX modules that are less good for gaming, but excellent at compute.

Moving absolutely everything to the unified model is going to basically guarantee that the Mac Pro is un-upgradeable.

Compute and content creation are highly dependent on unified model though. Apple is already recommending that pro applications leverage unified memory and Apple-specific GPU features (e.g. using tile shaders for image processing). It would be odd if they offered two models going forward. It seems they are looking to streamline and unify their programming models, and a compute-only card will not contribute to this.

I also think that there is a path for upgradable Mac Pro that keeps the advantages of the unified memory and the streamlined programming model. Apple could ship modular compute boards (each consisting of CPU, GPU and unified memory) that are organized in a NUMA fashion. Metal already has a peer group API that allows one to discover NUMA GPUs in the system.

 

[leman]

I dunno if they felt like "the future", but they did feel like you could run around with a more portable client and not lose much or anything in the process. Slap your MBP onto a Thunderbolt dock and an eGPU and you get a lot more oomph and all the ports you could need, while keeping the portability, and especially given Apple's reticence to ship a slotbox it offered a nice way to customize your product. My Mac mini is a good machine turned to a great one with a beefier eGPU, and under normal circumstances even TB3 bandwidth doesn't massively degrade performance. I really hope we see eGPU stuff return to AS.

Given the effort Apple made into developing eGPU support and then the MPX module and the Mac Pro platform after it was clear internally they already knew they were skating to AS, it seems a little weird to me they'd just drop external GPUs entirely, especially since at the high end it allows them to not spend time dwelling on it and just drop in whatever AMD's cooking up.

It’s more complicated than that, unfortunately. Apple GPUs are very different from mainstream GPUs and they can do things in a more efficient way. In fact, an app dev can achieve major performance improvements by redesigning their algorithms to take advantage of unique features only Apple GPUs offer. So obviously Apple wants you to use these features.

Now, if you keep AMD GPUs around, the dev has a problem. They could focus on Apple GPU features (but then it won’t work on AMD), they could implement a common path (but then it won’t work as well as it could on Apple hardware) or they could do both (which is unlikely as it’s expensive). From business standpoint, Apple therefore has very little incentive to keep eGPUs around. It probably makes more sense to them to lose the (very small) group of customers that rely on eGPUs if this means improving long-term software health of the system. Not to mention that Apple GPUs excel at tasks Apple markets them for and the price of the GPU can more than cover the difference to the next tier model with the faster GPU that will most likely outperform your external box anyway.

P.S. I had an eGPU which I sold immediately after last years WWDC, as it became immediately clear to me where this all is going.

 

[jmho]

Compute and content creation are highly dependent on unified model though. Apple is already recommending that pro applications leverage unified memory and Apple-specific GPU features (e.g. using tile shaders for image processing). It would be odd if they offered two models going forward. It seems they are looking to streamline and unify their programming models, and a compute-only card will not contribute to this.

True, but I'm thinking that the main reason somebody buys a Mac Pro with high end GPUs today is ray tracing or machine learning, where you're not going to be doing anything particularly Metal specific like tile shaders or TBDR, nor are you going to do too much syncing between CPU and GPU.

I think you're right that almost everything else will move over to a unified model. Even video has reached the point where you probably don't need a Mac Pro, and maybe raytracing will get there in the future, but we're not there yet.

Apple themselves have a WWDC video where they do metal raytracing using 4 GPUs on a MacBook Pro. Part of me hopes that Apple is going to retain the ability to run such a crazy setup from a laptop, because even if the M1X GPU is a beast, it's not going to compete with 4x external 6900XTs for rendering.

 

[leman]

True, but I'm thinking that the main reason somebody buys a Mac Pro with high end GPUs today is ray tracing or machine learning, where you're not going to be doing anything particularly Metal specific like tile shaders or TBDR, nor are you going to do too much syncing between CPU and GPU.

But especially for ray tracing Apple‘s model is very advantageous. Unified memory means that you are not limited by the amount of RAM your GPU has. Metal already has higher raytracing limits than other APIs, with production renderers being an obvious target. Machine learning is similar - Apple GPUs expose advanced SIMD intrinsics that allow you to use them for matrix multiplication more efficiently (although you are probably more likely to use the NPU or the AMX here anyway).

To be honest, I don’t think Apple will be positioning these machines as pure number crunchers. This is more about hybrid workloads and advanced algorithms.

 

[jmho]

Again true, but I can't imagine many pro renderers using Apple's model off the bat because it's going to probably look different to the Windows / Linux versions, and everything looking the same irrespective of platform is very important for a pro renderer and they probably have a bunch of shaders they just want to port directly to metal.

And yes, it's an incredibly small minority of users who want to use Macs to crunch numbers, but they exist and that's why the Mac Pro exists.

My point being that the discrete GPU model already exists in Metal, and will probably be there for at least another 5 years, so it wouldn't be a huge shock if Apple used that model for their own ultra high end GPUs, where the fact that there are multiple big hot GPUs will make up for the lack of features and shared memory.

Either way I'm sure the M1X will be shared, so we probably won't find out Apple's plan for the Mac Pro for quite a while.

 

[Bandaman]

I highly doubt we’ll see third-party GPUs at this point ever again. Having said that, whatever Apple comes out with based on their curry M chips is going to be insanely ridiculous.

 

[Boil]

If the Jade xC rumors are true, then the performance of the M1X (or whatever it is called) introduced on Monday will tell us a lot about how the Jade xC SoC packages might perform...?

Looking forward to a M1X Mac mini with a 10-core CPU (8P/2E) / 64GB RAM / 32-core GPU / 1TB SSD / 10Gb Ethernet...!

 

[diamond.g]

If the Jade xC rumors are true, then the performance of the M1X (or whatever it is called) introduced on Monday will tell us a lot about how the Jade xC SoC packages might perform...?

Looking forward to a M1X Mac mini with a 10-core CPU (8P/2E) / 64GB RAM / 32-core GPU / 1TB SSD / 10Gb Ethernet...!

Maybe. It really depends on if Apple reuses CPU or/and GPU cores.
It would be easier to see how things are going to be if Apple used Chiplets. But as of right now they are using monolithic dies. So 🤷🏽‍♂️