IrreverentHippie t1_itiz1ke wrote
An apple dGPU would be cool, especially if it’s available for both Mac and PC, it would add a 4th player to the GPU market.
DefinitelyNotMasterS t1_itizpr3 wrote
Surely Apple, the highest valued company ever, is going to change their philosophy on creating things for other systems
[deleted] t1_itj5w9t wrote
[removed]
IrreverentHippie t1_itj041h wrote
Knowing how good their video acceleration hardware is, they could easily dominate that market on all platforms. I’d personally expect the pro GPU market to be where they would probably try to compete if they did made a PCIe GPU+Video acceleration card available for the general computer market.
And having more options to pick from is always good.
MrChip53 t1_itj0s1g wrote
Apple sells an ecosystem though. Not hardware components.
IrreverentHippie t1_itj1spt wrote
Well, yes. But if they also sold hardware components they could probably do very well in that area too
acsmars t1_itj2rwc wrote
Every sale of a high end GPU would mean one less entire workstation sale they could’ve forced into their camp.
It’s like asking them to sell their iphone software or SoC. They can make more money selling the whole phone, it’d cost them sales to sell it piecemeal . If you’ve got a killer market leading feature and an industry leading product you’re selling, you don’t sell the secret sauce to your competitors.
MrChip53 t1_itjbtiz wrote
And don't forget that when you buy the whole device they now have you locked in on software sales too.
IrreverentHippie t1_itjqbpq wrote
Think of it like this, they sell an accelerator card, people go “hey, this apple GPU is awesome”. then apple tells them it works even better in their own computers, because it does, and people go “I guess I should buy an apple computer, I can run my video editing software even faster.”
And then you have people both. Buying your accelerators, and entire systems. Now the ecosystem caters to a wide variety of users, not just “Pros, and facebook scrollers”.
Now apple would have to directly compete with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. But this competition should potentially help drive innovation, which would help rapidly accelerate the growth and development of computer technology in a 4 way arms race.
acsmars t1_itjtg4y wrote
Apple does not benefit from increased competition or innovation. Competitive markets are bad for business. GPU chip making is also less profitable than their current markets. This is also why they don’t manufacture their products in house, device manufacturing is a much less profitable business than the product design and software services that they currently operate in.
Apple’s play is and always has been total design and control of the user experience. That’s their differentiator. They’ve no incentive to release a less profitable product, in a competitive market segment, that they can’t fully control, and which is less compatible with their software/services businesses. They will continue to cater to their demographic: people who want their wholistic designed experience and are willing to pay up to get it. That’s how they became the most valuable company.
IrreverentHippie t1_itkl0ra wrote
Not entirely. They became the most valuable company by having hardware and software that work well together
acsmars t1_itlkxhq wrote
Which you get by selling complete platforms, not oem parts or components.
IrreverentHippie t1_itn5zvf wrote
Yes, but. Apple could easily use a desktop GPU as a gateway product.
MrChip53 t1_itj2s0p wrote
I'm sure they could but I really don't think Apple cares. Their product isn't Mac books or iPhones either. It's the apple ecosystem. Itunes, icloud, Siri, home thing if thats what it's called, etc. They want you stuck in it so you keep coming back to give them money. A GPU wouldn't cut it so isn't worth the investment to put on shelves. If you want to use their chips you need to buy their devices and be in their ecosystem.
IrreverentHippie t1_itjpnrd wrote
I don’t care, a balanced economy is needed, and this is a way to do it.
MrChip53 t1_itjrrba wrote
Apple couldn't give two shits about a balanced economy or the way you think to do it..
IrreverentHippie t1_itjspgl wrote
Well, I don’t think it matters anyway, the world is already ending, so who cares?
jaceapoc t1_itj73zo wrote
They kinda do now tho. Their M chips in their latest computers are now a big reason people go for Apple. More and more pros are buying Apple computers for the sole reason that the M chip in it is more powerful than quite a few PC chips for a lot of tasks. People used to buy MacBooks and iMacs mostly because it was “cool”, beautiful, functional out of the box, etc. Apple was for the most part a hype brand, only the “cool” people had those. They bought into the marketing just so they could be mostly showing off. Now people are starting to buy it for the hardware in those machines, because they’re actually that much better at actual benchmarks etc.
MrChip53 t1_itj9ll4 wrote
Yes but you get stuck in the ecosystem when you buy it and that is what they really want. They want you giving them a cut everytime you buy a song, app, etc.
They used to use Intel chips to tie the apple ecosystem together on desktop. Now they have their own chips that make their desktop experience better in their apple ecosystem. But it's still all about the ecosystem.
johansugarev t1_itla42o wrote
We go for Apple because of the whole ecosystem. The chips are great but they’re nothing without the software and hardware around them. That’s what Apple is great at and that is a fact.
People who buy computers to show off do not make Apples bottom line.
acsmars t1_itj2g4v wrote
If it would be dominant, they’d rather sell a $6k workstation than a $2k part. Less driver support/compatibility to manage and more money.
Every other hardware company wishes they could pull in buyers and revenue like Apple does, why would Apple change?
wosmo t1_itjjorb wrote
I'm not sure it'd work out. A lot of what makes M1 work is having everything on the same fabric. It gives them awesome memory bandwidth, unity memory so the gpu properly shares the cpu's ram, giving zero transfer time, etc. A lot of the gains come from architecture that wouldn't survive being taken off the SoC package.
That said, I'd love to be proven wrong, because competition is good.
(On the down side, it's also why we're unlikely going to see replaceable RAM - taking it off the chiplets would take it off the fabric, and lose that bandwidth. Best-case scenario is the on-package RAM and the replaceable RAM would work on different tiers, making the on-package RAM the mother of all caches.)
IrreverentHippie t1_itjpk4o wrote
They do have their afterburner card, and the Mac Pro already uses a modified version of PCIe. The key difference is the M1 macs are laptops and all in ones, and the Mac Pro is a modular system. It’s a different beast. The MacBook Pro has to be power efficient as well as fast, where a desktop computer like the Mac Pro does not have that limitation. The current Mac Pro already uses infinity fabric bridges to link the graphics cards. Apple could easily design an accelerator card that has everything you need in one card. A GPGPU isn’t hard to design. You just have to understand form factors.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments