Comment by bayindirh
3 months ago
That's true. What I wanted to point out is the fact that the most tightly integrated and arguably the most locked down platform on the market is more open than a platform designed to be adapted by others and sold by many.
I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.
This comparison makes no sense. It's desktops/laptops vs phones. In either case Apple is the worst offender. You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs, or install other OSes on iPhone.
> You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs
afaik you technically can, except that m1/m2 force pcie bars to be mapped as device memory (forbids unaligned r/w), so most gpu software (and drivers) that just issue memcpys to vram and expect the fabric to behave sanely will sigbus. it's possible to work around this, and some people indeed have with amdgpu, but it'd absolutely destroy performance to fix in the general case
so it doesn't really have anything to do with apple themselves blocking it but rather a niche implementation detail of the AS platform that's essentially an erratum
You would think Apple would update this or put out another support page supporting what you're saying: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363
There's also an Apple VP saying unified memory on AS doesn't leave room for DGPUs and separate VRAM.
I think this is more than just an erratum, even with newer chips. It's monopolistic behavior all too common nowadays.
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