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Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

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Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#181

Post by fg137 »

afavour wrote: post #93
MrArthegor wrote: post #88

A good technical project, but honestly useless in like 90% of scenarios. You want to use an NVidia GPU for LLM ? just buy a basic PC on second hand (the GPU is the primary cost anyway), you want to use Mac for good amount of VRAM ? Buy a Mac. With this proposed solution you have an half-backed system, the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port and you don’t have access to all of NVidia tool and library, and on other…

Chicken/egg. NVidia tooling is lacking surely in part because the hardware wasn’t usable on macOS until now. Now that it’s usable that might change.

Until there is official support for Mac coming from nvidia, I don't think anything will happen.

> the hardware wasn't usable on macOS

This eGPU thing is from a third-party if I understand correctly. I don't see why nvidia would get excited about that. If they cared about the platform, they would have released something already.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#182

Post by bigyabai »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #173
vondur wrote: post #51

If you could get Nvidia driver support on Mac’s I bet Apple would have sold more MacPro’s.

If unfamiliar: it is a big deal that AAPL & NVDA again have an official relationship. For well over the previous decade Apple has not allowed newer nVidia GPUs (by not allowing drivers). A seven year old GPU (e.g. VEGA64, RTX1080Ti) can still process more tokens/second than most Apple Silicon (particularly the lower-ends). As discussed elsewhere, Apple MAX/Ultra processors are best-suited for huge models (but are not…

This is not an official relationship, this is a third-party effort by tiny corp with no Nvidia involvement.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#183

Post by bigyabai »

polotics wrote: post #4
wmf wrote: post #3

Pretty misleading. This driver is only for compute not graphics.

As a sizable share of the market is going to want to use this for local LLMs, I do not think this is that misleading.

Most people I know are not using TinyGrad for inference, but CUDA or Vulkan (neither of which are provided here).

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#184

Post by tensor-fusion »

MrArthegor wrote: post #88

A good technical project, but honestly useless in like 90% of scenarios. You want to use an NVidia GPU for LLM ? just buy a basic PC on second hand (the GPU is the primary cost anyway), you want to use Mac for good amount of VRAM ? Buy a Mac. With this proposed solution you have an half-backed system, the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port and you don’t have access to all of NVidia tool and library, and on other…

[flagged]

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#185

Post by bigyabai »

tensor-fusion wrote: post #184
MrArthegor wrote: post #88

A good technical project, but honestly useless in like 90% of scenarios. You want to use an NVidia GPU for LLM ? just buy a basic PC on second hand (the GPU is the primary cost anyway), you want to use Mac for good amount of VRAM ? Buy a Mac. With this proposed solution you have an half-backed system, the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port and you don’t have access to all of NVidia tool and library, and on other…

[flagged]

> same PyTorch/CUDA calls, just intercepted by a stub library that forwards them over the local network.

At that point you're making more work for yourself than debugging over SSH.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#186

Post by bigyabai »

GeekyBear wrote: post #179
bigyabai wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monopoly market share video service A "monopoly" "service"? What have they monopolized, laziness? It's not the App Store, you can go replace it with DailyMotion at your earliest convenience. You're still retreading why your original comment was not at all relevant to the critique being made. We have precedent for prosecuting monopolistic behavior in America, but it doesn't encompass services even when they're manda…

When your product has a monopoly market share, you don't get to use it as a weapon against competitors in other markets, even if you claim there is some imaginary exception to antitrust law involving servers.

You don't get to demand that the server support your endpoint, period. There is no precedent for that ever happening in US antitrust law, because it's not anticompetitive.

If you think otherwise, make your case to Google's lawyers instead of spinning hypothetical case law.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#187

Post by brookst »

TheDong wrote: post #54
mulderc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in any market they are in.

It depends how you define the market. In the 2001 microsoft case [0], the courts ruled Microsoft had a monopoly over the "Intel-based personal computer market". Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS. Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE b…

Reductionism is so cringe.

Intel sold chips to anyone. Anyone could make Intel computers.

Apple does not sell chips to anyone. Nobody else can make m-series computers.

Your argument is basically that Ford has a monopoly on selling mustangs because standard oil had a monopoly on selling oil.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#188

Post by wtallis »

bigyabai wrote: post #164
wtallis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Apple support the major standard device categories: NVMe, XHCI, AHCI, and such, like most operating systems do? The challenges are all for hardware that needs a vendor-specific driver instead of conforming to a standard driver interface (which doesn't always exist). Lots of those can be supported with userspace drivers, which can be supplied by third parties instead of needing to be written by Apple.

> NVMe Using proprietary connectors. > XHCI Not on Lightning. > AHCI How exactly would Apple not support AHCI?

>> NVMe

> Using proprietary connectors.

Not for the past decade; it's been no connectors for most products, but standard PCIe connectors for the Mac Pro, and NVMe over Thunderbolt works fine.

>> XHCI

> Not on Lightning.

Again, not relevant to any recent products. And I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding what XHCI is if you think anything with a Lightning connector is relevant here (XHCI is not USB 3.0). You can connect a Thunderbolt dock that includes an XHCI USB host controller and it works out of the box with no further driver or software support. I assume you can do the same with a USB controller card in a Mac Pro.

>> AHCI

> How exactly would Apple not support AHCI?

This might be another case of you not understanding what you're talking about and are lost in an entirely different layer of the protocol stack. Not supporting AHCI would be easy, since they're no longer selling any products that use SATA, and PCIe SSDs that use AHCI instead of NVMe died out a decade ago. But as far as I know, a SATA controller card at the far end of a Thunderbolt link or in a Mac Pro PCIe slot should still work, if the SATA controller uses AHCI instead of something proprietary as is typical for SAS controllers.

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#189

Post by seaal »

amatecha wrote: post #144
qoez wrote: post #36

Idk why this doesn't link to the original source instead of this proxy source: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736

Probably because you can't actually read anything more than the initial post without getting a login-wall: "Join X now to read replies on this post." (Not to mention "X" is a trash site now)

I mean, just setup redirector extension and never think about it again.

Redirect: https://x.com/*

to: https://xcancel.com/$1

Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

#190

Post by SvenL »

detourdog wrote: post #127
SvenL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well “had to use” is a strong phrase here. Linux was already around and you could have used it too with your hardware. I think you can always bend an argument to fit your point.

The PC manufacturers had to pay MS for a license no matter what operating system was installed.

Didn’t knew that, but only if they also sold windows pc? Like, if a company would only sold blank PCs without any offering associated to MS they wouldn’t need to pay MS anything.
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