IrreverentHippie

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.

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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.

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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.

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