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posted by martyb on Monday July 13 2020, @03:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the Apple-of-my-eye dept.

Apple has built its own Mac graphics processors:

Like iPhones and iPads, Apple Silicon Macs will use an Apple-designed GPU – something that makes complete sense when you consider this is how current iOS devices work. But it could be a reason for pause by some high-end users during the transition period from Intel-based hardware.

[...] You see, while Intel Macs contain GPU’s from Intel, Nvidia and AMD, Apple Silicon Macs will use what the company seems fond of calling “Apple family” GPUs. These use a rendering system called Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), which iOS devices already use.

It works differently from the Immediate Mode rendering system supported in Intel Macs: While the latter immediately render imaging data to device memory, the former makes more use of the GPU by sorting out each element first before submitting it to device memory.

You can find out more here.

The effect is that TBDR rendering delivers lower latency, higher performance, lower power requirements and can achieve higher degrees of bandwidth. The A11 chip and Metal 2 really consolidated this technique.

It’s important to note that the GPU in a Mac with Apple silicon is a member of both GPU families, and supports both Mac family and Apple family feature sets. In other words, using Apple Silicon and Rosetta, you should still be able to use software designed for Intel-based Macs.

[...] How will Apple exploit this? Will it ditch fans in order to make thinner Macs? Will it exploit the opportunity to explore a new design language for its PCs? At what point will an iPhone become all the Mac you ever need, given your choice of user interface and access to a larger screen?


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  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday July 13 2020, @06:24AM (3 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Monday July 13 2020, @06:24AM (#1020165) Journal

    Apple is heading to technological solipsism completely. That's how far.

    And I say that as an owner of 8 working Apple devices in total (MacBook Pro model 2015, IPhone6s, two iPads, Watch, Pencil, Magic Keyboard, AirPort router, a complete ecosystem good enough for platform software development). Anything designed by Apple after Jobs's death makes me scared. Their software is rolling downhill too. No future.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 13 2020, @07:47AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 13 2020, @07:47AM (#1020179) Journal

    As far as the CPU is concerned, Apple has everything it needs in order to completely leave Intel in the dust. Or to be more specific, they can leave these Intel Xeon W CPUs [wikipedia.org] found in the 2019 Mac Pro models in the dust, ignoring anything Intel or AMD puts out over the next few years. But it won't matter because they can make ARM hardware that is faster than the 2019 x86 baseline (as long as the software runs on it).

    8-16 big cores clocking somewhere between 3 GHz and 4 GHz [anandtech.com]? No problem. Small cores? How about 64-128? 28-core Xeon crushed. Throw 32-64 GB of HBM on the interposer. 128-196 GB of HBM is plausible using eight 8-Hi or 12-Hi stacks. Throw another $10,000 at the system to continue.

    Other hardware decisions and software will be harder than striking down Intel during its moment of weakness, but that's not what I'm interested in.

    You have a tough decision to make too. Will you complete your development ecosystem with the ultimate piece of kit [soylentnews.org]?

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    • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday July 13 2020, @09:14AM (1 child)

      by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Monday July 13 2020, @09:14AM (#1020193) Journal

      Most probably, no. I consider Apple betrayal of their user-centric ideals untolerable.

      I hold and use some other dev ecosystems as well. For a VR paradigm, Sony's PS4 Pro itself is unimpressive as a HW platform (it's bad technical engineering all over the box inside), but its PSVR, while clumsy, is quite hackable, the protocol is known by reversion and so the gadget is experimentally usable on free platforms too. I already focused on that one, for I consider a terminal running in a bulky cabled VR headset optically safe. It may not be as safe on any kind of transparent glasses because of possible optical side channel leak.
      Hacking Sony controllers is fun too, not bad for repurposing.

      As for phone and mobile comm stuff, my future is Huawei, no doubts. They have no competition.

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      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 13 2020, @09:35AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 13 2020, @09:35AM (#1020198) Journal

        Get yourself a MateStation [wccftech.com].

        One detail I missed from the article:

        The company has also committed to introducing new Intel-based Macs that do support these external systems for some time during the current transition.

        So I guess there could be 1-2 new generations of Intel x86 Xeon Macs.

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