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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 takyon on Monday July 13 2020, @05:02PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 13 2020, @05:02PM (#1020457) Journal

    That's the Afterburner card, right? What I remember is that it can handle 16K video.

    Graphics difficulty is exaggerated. They already make their own integrated graphics hardware. To some extent, they can just throw more GPU cores at the problem. Apple A12X/A12Z has 7-8 GPU "cores" vs. 4 for A12, A13 [wikipedia.org] has 4 again. Each A13 "core" is just 3.25 mm2 on TSMC N7P (total GPU area is 15.28 mm2, not 13 mm2). Instead of 4-8 cores, they could put more like 128 of them on a non-mobile SoC, especially on denser nodes like "5nm". HBM can provide more memory bandwidth and lower power draw. Other scaling issues can be dealt with.

    Reaching the 5-56 teraflops levels of GPU performance of various Mac(Book) Pro products with dGPUs could be difficult, but not impossible.

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