Comment by bigyabai
2 days ago
Apple Silicon copied AMD's mistake. RDNA and Apple Silicon are both the slowest GPU architecture for AI because they spent 6 years optimizing raster performance over compute. Now there's 4 generations of Apple Silicon Macs that rely on compute shaders for any kind of efficient inference. Even the M5 GPU is less programmable than Nvidia's ARM GPUs from 2017.
ARM datacenters were a trillion-dollar market that Apple made ~$0 off of. The Mac Pro could have fit that niche, but Tim Cook chose to depreciate it instead of letting the PCIe connectors be used with Nvidia cards. He cut off Apple's nose to spite Nvidia's face. It's nonsense, especially since they're crawling back to Nvidia to license their interconnect, in tacit recognition that it wasn't a real grudge in the first place. My guess is that Ternus doesn't have Tim's money allergy, maybe at the White House's request. In any case, the grudge is over, and Apple forfeit ARM HPC altogether.
> because I can fix the one thing that’s giving us trouble memory because we have the talent and the money to fix it in the next four years.
By all means, continue. Which X account or YouTube channel convinced you that Apple could replace SK Hynix in 4 years?
> The Mac Pro could have fit that niche, but Tim Cook chose to depreciate it instead of letting the PCIe connectors be used with Nvidia cards. He cut off Apple's nose to spite Nvidia's face.
Apple Silicon only has support for 16k pages via DART, rather than the 4k pages typically used by AMD/Nvidia. The requirement to coordinate a major change of drivers to understand 16k pages is why both PCIe GPU and eGPU do not work (or rather, did not work - TinyGPU is a compatibility layer that adds eGPU support and is used for AI workflows).
The Mac Pro's biggest redeeming feature for a data center was that it was rack-mountable. The ARM version was still mostly an empty case. It remained mostly for its ability to support PCIe cards for video and audio production use cases, such as live broadcasting.
> especially since they're crawling back to Nvidia to license their interconnect
Licensing the interconnect for broader compatibility. They support other interconnects as well.
Yes, the traditional Mac Pro customer now has pivoted to Windows or some Linux powered enterprise workstation powered by Ubuntu, Red-Hat, SuSE.