Apple testing new external display with A13 chip

TDM is good because you can use it as a monitor long after you've stopped using it as a computer.

My worry with embedding an A13 or whatever is that it will require an Apple device to do anything or a bunch of hackery to make it work on a non-Apple device. Previous Apple monitors were already sometimes a PITA to get running with non-Apple stuff. It just ends up with more ecosystem lock in and that's not needed from a probably $1000+ monitor.

I think it actually makes a lot of sense, from a computer architecture point of view: (1) total resolution is generally a component of the graphic processing power needed (for straightforward graphics rendering), and so scaling GPU power with displays/resolution make sense (2) placing a GPU in the display lower the demands on the interface, of which Apple has repeatedly hit the limits on

In addition/as a result of these you get some usability and user experience advantages: (a) avoiding degrading laptop performance when connecting an external display without the user having to know about eGPUs (b) no additional box/cables/power mess from using an eGPU

And cooling can be easier through a large flat surface too. In fact that could be one of the main reasons.

macOS uses a PDF-like canvas as the core display engine^, upon which everything writes object layers that have refresh loops independent from the main canvas 'flatten layers into the display' loop. This is all inside WindowServer, and is why lets you select an entire window including the shadowed border, without picking up anything from above or beneath it, because Spacebar activates object selection mode.

And we know that Apple has figured out secure pairing of T2 chips for external accessories (the touchID keyboard), so they can run secure-trusted components outside of the main hardware.

So they could in theory run a WindowServer process on the display's internal Cortex chip, paired via T2 to provide verifiable security, hosting the WindowServer canvas for that display and lets the host device offload the 'flatten layers to display' problem, handle the EDR mapping, and so on. That would be a boon to laptops and also to thermally-constrained desktops, and here's why:

On my Mac, WindowServer is the highest user of CPU time in total, exceeding kernel_task, coreaudiod, everything except Zoom (which does non-accelerated H.264 encoding/decoding on x64). So if I were to plug in a second 5K display alongside my built-in, my WindowServer CPU usage would double. Fortunately, I can afford that — but maybe a laptop cannot. Offloading that WindowServer burden for managing traffic to/from the LCD, and for dealing with layer flattening and security property management (you can't screenshot certain OS dialogs with a specific security flag set!), would be a tremendous win not only for battery life of the host, but also a theoretical performance win for latency, as now macOS would only need to shuttle specific layer changes over the wire.

Of course, it could still act as a dumb display for any host that isn't ready to negotiate a T2-protected WindowServer connection, but my idea above would definitely go a long way to explaining why Apple dropped support for x64-style eGPU while still investigating hardware-accelerated monitors.

^ it used to be implemented as PDF internally, not sure if it still is or not

^^ you used to be able to kernel panic macOS by making a window so tall that, when screenshot using the Spacebar layer selection method, an out-of-bounds write would occur from within WindowServer

Arguably what's an appropriate GPU bandwidth is largely defined by the display attached to it, primarily its resolution, color depth, and refresh rate.

But I still don't think it makes sense to physically merge the two.

Displays wear out far faster than the GPUs driving them, and just have much higher failure rates in general, being physical targets for thrown handheld controllers and what not. Doesn't seem wise to make the display so much more costly to replace by shoving the GPU within it.

But this is Apple... making this expensive to replace is kind of their M.O.