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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @10:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @10:06PM (#1020763)

    I'm a bit curious about some of these moves because Apple simply doesn't have the marketshare to get developers to develop software that needs to go through an entire porting process to run on their hardware. Once they swapped Intel processors for anything else, swapping out the GPU chips for something other than AMD, Intel or NVidia is not that big of a deal.

    What doesn't much make sense to me is that they used to be completely unable to run the software that ran on PCs without going through the process of porting it over there and the amount of software suffered for it. If you wanted to work with people that were using PCs you had to hope that either the software being used was available on both sides or, failing that, that there was a file format that was compatible on both sides and didn't cause weird things to happen due to subtly different implementations.

    We'll see how this works out, but this is a really strange move to make.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 13 2020, @10:40PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 13 2020, @10:40PM (#1020792) Journal

    There's already a lot of software that targets Windows x86 but not Mac x86. At least this move towards ARM will unify iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc.

    It also seems like emulation can happen one way or another. Windows 10 on ARM will probably end up booting on ARM Macs at some point, and it will be able to emulate x64 in 2021.

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