What we just don’t know yet is what the non-Apple GPU strategy is. The Apple Silicon strategy has been as much about the Apple GPU as it has been about the move to ARM, full stop.
It isn't that Apple's strategy is unknown. It more Apple's disclosures of the strategy are incomplete.
It is pretty crystal clear that Apple is out to 'kill' OpenGL and OpenCL. They are pragmatically about just as hostiles to Vulkan. It is Metal or the "highway out of town". There are no "plans" for macOS 11.0 (perhaps through all of the 10.0.x updates ) for non Apple GPUs. (e.g, the slide at WWDC 2020).
They are biased to their own GPU. Apple GPU will come first in terms of macOS support. It is more a question of just how exclusionary they are going to be and for how long.
Apple’s display strategy across both iDevices and Macs is about supporting 4K+ displays in even the most entry level price points whereas in the PC world, this is a premium capability, which is why LG hasn’t even bothered making their 5K monitor work well with anything but Macs.
The Ultrafine LG monitors aren't most of LG's line up. A monitor with no buttons and one-and-only-one input just won't sell well with non Apple fans in the monitor market.
LG's other Thunderbolt monitors aren't limited like that at all. Ultrafines have Apple doing some serious, overt "back seat driving". It is build at the request of Apple , not the general market.
That’s mainly what Apple is solving for with their GPUs. The real question is whether the high end iMacs and large MBPs can be powered by Apple GPUs. If they can, we get into an odd man out problem at the desktop Pro level once more with the tension around sustained investment in supporting a non-Apple GPU for a single product.
Actually this is about the lower end iMacs too. Apple has somewhat kneecapped them in terms of GPUs. If Apple has access to a lower main system SoC ( CPU+iGPU) they could expand the performance of the 21-24" iMac's GPU inside the same overall thermal envelope.
To a lessor extent the same with the Mini.
So it is what they want to do with the whole desktop line in terms of GPUs. Apple extending the iGPU of the M1 to cover the lowest end dGPUs they use. Yeah if they are shooting for largely no substantive improvement in performance. But is that really going to be competitive to the overall market in the basic iMac's price range. ?
Laptops? Yes. The goal is probably to remove all of the dGPUs. That is a clear path to battery life.
That why it seems like the best course will be to just keep the existing 7,1 going for the foreseeable future so they don’t have to deal with any of these issues. The Half Mac Pro is going to stump everyone until it’s released. If the goal is to be the escape valve for the AS transition, it could actually be another Intel box, regardless of what the Bloomberg article said.
Technically the Bloomberg article doesn't explicitly say anything other than shrinking the size. Possible cause was switching to lower power Apple SoC would "help". But GPUs were a driver of Mac Pro size also.
If the Half Mac Pro doesn't come in 1H 2021 it is quite doubtful that it will be Intel though. There could have been some delayed Intel CPU that slid out of a 2020 timeline roadmap into 2021. That wouldn't be shocking. But when Apple does the top end iMac SoC , there probably isn't a huge gap between that and the "half" Mac Pro. When the iMac 27" class system shows up and there is/isn't dGPU support that will be quite informative as to where the "half Mac Pro" is.
I highly doubt Apple is doing Apple Silicon "escape values". There are probably Intel systems that "should have been 2020 " that slid out of 2020. For example, a gen 11 H series ( Tiger Lake H) MBP 16" that stumbled into the first couple of months of 2021. Perhaps a "kick the can down the road" "half Mac Pro" instead of a "kick the can down the road " iMac Pro.
If it is just the Mac Pro out by its lonesome with dGPUs then yeah that will be a major "problem" .
