Apple quietly ditches AMD

[Jumballi]

While generating a lot of press and noise that they will be abandoning intel, Apple has quietly hinted that they will soon stop using AMD based graphics in their Macs. Apple made the "announcement" in a WWDC developer session, where they mention only Apple GPUs will support the new TBDR architecture and metal API, both of which are speculated to be more efficient on mobile systems.

 

Quote from Gizmodo UK

Quote

For Apple Silicon ARM architecture, TBDR is a much better match because its focus is on speed and lower power consumption – not to mention the GPU is on the same chip as the CPU, hence the term SoC. This is probably why Apple wrote, “Don’t assume a discrete GPU means better performance,” in its developer support document.

 

My thoughts

While this indeed does sound like they could possibly move away from AMD for the time being, AMD has announced their Radeon GPUs branching out into the mobile market, partnering with Samsung earlier last year. There are 4 reasons as to why they haven't announced why they would continue using AMD GPU;
1. Apple gains a leverage over AMD, they can now argue solely on GPU alone and leave CPU out of it.
2. AMD doesn't have enough time to release a new mobile GPU in time for the the first Apple Silicon Mac launch.
3. AMD might be under a contract that prevents them from working with apple at this time.
4. AMD mobile GPUs aren't mature enough for Apple to put them in a mac today.

 

Sources

https://www.techradar.com/news/could-apple-also-ditch-amd-to-make-its-own-graphics-cards
https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-ditch-amd-gpus-and-intel-cpus/
https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2020/07/apples-homegrown-chips-could-be-the-end-for-amd-graphics-in-macs/

[emosun]

all I know is this is just another nail in the coffin for the forever long battle of not being able to play games on a mac

[zeusthemoose]

I don’t see how they could ditch AMD (unless they switch to Nvidia?) because there’s no way Apple will be able to make a gpu powerful enough for professional use case in the next couple of years.

[Techstorm970]

Just now, zeusthemoose said:

I don’t see how they could ditch AMD (unless they switch to Nvidia?) because there’s no way Apple will be able to make a gpu powerful enough for professional use case in the next couple of years.

If you remember, Apple is planning to have their ARM machines be the low-end machines during the transition.  They have some time to improve their tech.

 

Enough time?  I guess we'll have to see...

[Guest]

I don't see where this mentions not using AMD on Intel-based systems?

[Jeppes]

6 minutes ago, zeusthemoose said:

I don’t see how they could ditch AMD (unless they switch to Nvidia?) because there’s no way Apple will be able to make a gpu powerful enough for professional use case in the next couple of years.

People who buy Apple computers dont care about performance. They would a Threadripper instead of Mac pro if they cared, theyll buy an ipad pro packed into a pc case fpr 8000$ if its just marketed properly to them.

[Jumballi]

5 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

I don't see where this mentions not using AMD on Intel-based systems?

In the slide it says AMD GPUs are only in intel based Macs

[Commodus]

5 minutes ago, Jeppes said:

People who buy Apple computers dont care about performance. They would a Threadripper instead of Mac pro if they cared, theyll buy an ipad pro packed into a pc case fpr 8000$ if its just marketed properly to them.

We do care about performance, we just aren't willing to sacrifice an interface and ecosystem we prefer just to say we score higher in a benchmark.  To abuse car analogies: if you go shopping for a car based purely on 0-60 times, you're A) missing out on so much more and B) probably not very fun.

[zeusthemoose]

15 minutes ago, Jeppes said:

People who buy Apple computers dont care about performance. They would a Threadripper instead of Mac pro if they cared, theyll buy an ipad pro packed into a pc case fpr 8000$ if its just marketed properly to them.

Not true at all. Many professionals use macs for video editing, music work, and animation. There are tons of apps needed by professionals that only work on macOS.

[TetraSky]

Welp, RIP gaming on a mac. (Not like we could've after they ditched Intel anyway, not sure why I'm even saying that here)

 

Remains to be seen if this will be a good move, or them shooting themselves in the foot some more... It probably won't have much impact for the regular people who buy mac as a "status symbol", but for professionals ? Who knows. These new chips better be able to deliver the same or better performances as what currently exist in their current lineup. (as in, things like render time and what not)

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

In the slide it says AMD GPUs are only in intel based Macs

They're still going to make Intel-based Macs with AMD GPUs though. I think everyone expects Apple GPUs with Apple CPUs because they are integrated.

 

18 minutes ago, Commodus said:

We do care about performance, we just aren't willing to sacrifice an interface and ecosystem we prefer just to say we score higher in a benchmark.  To abuse car analogies: if you go shopping for a car based purely on 0-60 times, you're A) missing out on so much more and B) probably not very fun.

If you go for a car based in 0-60 times its called a Honda and there's a reason why people don't buy them. 

[Sorenson]

I wonder if using their own silicon for the CPU and GPU will actually make more game developers pay attention to the mac. The way I look at it is, any game that ran on the upcoming chips in the macs would be easily portable to the iPhone, iPad, and apple TV (all of which support game controllers). This might make porting games to mac actually worth it to developers. 

[kelvinhall05]

3 minutes ago, Sorenson said:

I wonder if using their own silicon for the CPU and GPU will actually make more game developers pay attention to the mac.

Absolutely not. If they didn't want to work on MacOS when it was using familiar hardware, they certainly won't when it's using brand-new proprietary stuff.

[Sorenson]

1 minute ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Absolutely not. If they didn't want to work on MacOS when it was using familiar hardware, they certainly won't when it's using brand-new proprietary stuff.

ehh I'm probably just being optimistic. The way I look at it is before the developers wouldn't bother because people who game on Mac is a niche in a niche who could always just load up bootcamp. However, now every game they port into Mac OS could easily be also ported onto all the other devices. This might make it actually worth it for the developers to invest in porting the games. Look at how popular Fortnite is on the iPhone. 

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

I guess Infinity Blade will finally be released for desktops.

Too bad Infinity Blade has been removed from the App Store since 2018 

[Jumballi]

2 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

They're still going to make Intel-based Macs with AMD GPUs though. I think everyone expects Apple GPUs with Apple CPUs because they are integrated.

Intel based Macs have one more revision and then they’re out. Come next year, the last intel Mac will be released
 

So far at this time, apple has confirmed, that Apple Silicon Macs will only support Apple GPUs.

[justpoet]

5 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

Intel based Macs have one more revision and then they’re out. Come next year, the last intel Mac will be released
 

So far at this time, apple has confirmed, that Apple Silicon Macs will only support Apple GPUs.

What Apple has actually confirmed is that Apple Silicon is the only place you can get Apple GPU.  As far as I can tell, they haven't confirmed no discrete cards with Apple Silicon.  They didn't mention the combo, and it is a reasonable bet it won't be supported, but that's very different from Apple confirming it won't be.

[Letgomyleghoe]

2 hours ago, Commodus said:

 To abuse car analogies: if you go shopping for a car based purely on 0-60 times, you're A) missing out on so much more and B) probably not very fun.

i mean then theres those of us who participate in street races and need the speed and are very fun, sure 0-60 isnt indicative of everything about the car but gives a good idea of performance

 

 

if apple was any other company they would be shooting themselves in the foot, now devs have to start working with ARM programs, and i bet were going to see a decrease in non mac developed apps, i know this ARM has nothing to do with gpus, but just the general direction at this point.

[hishnash]

16 minutes ago, justpoet said:

hey didn't mention the combo, and it is a reasonable bet it won't be supported,

What Apple have been saying is that at runtime if you get a list of GPUs `you should not assume discreet GPUs are faster than the integrated Apple Silicon GPU` this means that the api that lists connected GPUs will continue to list discreet GPUs on apple silicon. From this and the other apis it is clear there will still be discrete GPUs.

I do not expect any macs (other than the macPro) will ship with AMD GPUs however, but they will be supporting eGPU that is clear from the API and talks.

 

26 minutes ago, Jumballi said:

So far at this time, apple has confirmed, that Apple Silicon Macs will only support Apple GPUs.

no all they have said is all macs will have Apple GPUs (and that the AppleGPU will be the gpu returned by the system when you ask for `default gpu`) they have said nothing about not having other GPUs. The fact that they make it clear that the `default` gpu api might return a different value to the discrete GPUs that can still be returned by the gpu listing api means they want developers to update code that selects the gpu from the gpu list, if the gpu list just returned one gpu then they would not be talking about these code changes needed by us developers.

 

 

3 hours ago, emosun said:

all I know is this is just another nail in the coffin for the forever long battle of not being able to play games on a mac

This is no effect at all on what games will run, games on macOS use metal or the deprecated openGL. Both of these have exactly the same api on AMD and Apple Silicon Gpus.  Infant apple moving to apple GPUs will likely mean we have variable 120hz refresh rate on apple apple silicon macs with the same extremely low latency pipelines that apple have built for the iPadPro. So in many ways moving to having apple macs will 120hz displays will make it the largest high refresh rate userbase within a week of the first devices shipping.

[Orangeator]

1 hour ago, captain_to_fire said:

Too bad Infinity Blade has been removed from the App Store since 2018 

Hold on just one second, actually read the article...

Quote

It also teases that “you may find Infinity Blade popping up in places you wouldn’t expect” in the future.

Um, I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like Epic Games knew all the way back in 2018 (Dec) that ARM was coming to the mac... @gabrielcarvfer

[atxcyclist]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

We do care about performance, we just aren't willing to sacrifice an interface and ecosystem we prefer just to say we score higher in a benchmark.  To abuse car analogies: if you go shopping for a car based purely on 0-60 times, you're A) missing out on so much more and B) probably not very fun.

But if the task is to go 0-60, then buying something that degrades that performance for something subjective or aesthetic is pointless. In workstation computing power is more important than anything, and the Apple ecosystem is only beneficial over Windows if you do sound/music or movie production; Apple will only retain those markets if they can build processors and graphics cards that are fast enough for those professionals, otherwise they'll go to Windows/Linux x86/AMD64 machines that have that power available. 

 

 

[williamcll]

5 hours ago, emosun said:

all I know is this is just another nail in the coffin for the forever long battle of not being able to play games on a mac

I guess apple arcade doesn't really count.

[RejZoR]

The rendering architecture claim is a bit... wrong. Both, AMD and NVIDIA use tile based deferred rendering these days. What game even uses immediate mode these days? Everything is expected to run deferred mode unless it's some DX9 based indie game...

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, atxcyclist said:

Apple will only retain those markets if they can build processors and graphics cards

Apple solutions for these markets are already clear, high end bespoke fixed function/FPGA style solutions. Im not sure apple will push a dedicated GPU PCIe card, since most of the use case for a dedicated GPU on a macPro are not for 3d tasks but rather for compute focused cards so i expect much more a selection of Compute cards. They might well consider the raw Polygon compute rate fast enough on the SoCs they will build, and expand further the ability to easily offload parts of metal compute tasks to multiple gpus (with inter gpu scheduling and communication).

I also expect apple to provide high end cpu perfomance in workstations by leveraging the deep hardware/software integration, likely we will see some form of non-uniform memory with the SoC including 16GB or 32GB of on-die extremely low latency memory. With apples deep os integration, and ability to push developers to use new apis they can make this work for the scheduler in ways that MS just cant even start to consider.  I expect to see a lot of custom solutions like this that will enable apple to be very competitive in this space without pushing the `raw` brute force approach.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

But if the task is to go 0-60, then buying something that degrades that performance for something subjective or aesthetic is pointless. In workstation computing power is more important than anything, and the Apple ecosystem is only beneficial over Windows if you do sound/music or movie production; Apple will only retain those markets if they can build processors and graphics cards that are fast enough for those professionals, otherwise they'll go to Windows/Linux x86/AMD64 machines that have that power available. 

 

 

Whilst I agree in sentiment and for the most part in reality,  what isn't true is that the apple ecosystem is not actually beneficial over windows for music or sound production.  In fact many specialists in the field argue it is worse since they dumped firewire.