wosmo t1_itjjorb wrote on October 24, 2022 at 2:43 AM

Reply to comment by IrreverentHippie in Apple testing Apple Silicon Mac Pro with 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, 192GB of memory by prehistoric_knight

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 on October 24, 2022 at 3:32 AM

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.