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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

#211

Post by embedding-shape »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #210

> If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for! I got an eGPU back in 2018 and could never get it to work. To the point that it soured me from doing it again. These days for heavy duty work I just offload to the cloud. This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM.

> This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM.

Except it's done by a third group, tinygrad, so it's more non-nvidia people wanting to use nvidia hardware one Apple hardware, than "nvidia trying to be relevant".

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

#212

Post by EagnaIonat »

embedding-shape wrote: post #211
EagnaIonat wrote: post #210

> If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for! I got an eGPU back in 2018 and could never get it to work. To the point that it soured me from doing it again. These days for heavy duty work I just offload to the cloud. This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM.

> This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM. Except it's done by a third group, tinygrad, so it's more non-nvidia people wanting to use nvidia hardware one Apple hardware, than "nvidia trying to be relevant".

Thanks for the correction. I guess my PTSD on trying to get this running before is bias'ing my response.

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

#213

Post by ffsm8 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #211
EagnaIonat wrote: post #210

> If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for! I got an eGPU back in 2018 and could never get it to work. To the point that it soured me from doing it again. These days for heavy duty work I just offload to the cloud. This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM.

> This all feels like NVidia trying to be relevant versus ARM. Except it's done by a third group, tinygrad, so it's more non-nvidia people wanting to use nvidia hardware one Apple hardware, than "nvidia trying to be relevant".

Yeh, Nvidia couldn't give less of a fuck about consumers. And egpu is inherently only consumer targeted.

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

#214

Post by dapperdrake »

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…

Thank you for opening my mind to a viewpoint I didn’t even know existed.

Yes, for many scenarios this is "not even an academic exercise".

For a very select few applications this is Gold. Finally serious linear algebra crunch for the taking. (Without custom GPU tapeout.)

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

#215

Post by throawayonthe »

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…

the tooling is just the standard linux tooling inside the container, no? and thunderbolt is not a real limitation

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

#216

Post by detourdog »

SvenL wrote: post #190
detourdog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was the what the trial about. If you wanted to contract with MS you had to pay for a license on every box shipped. Dell, Compaq, Gateway, HP, IBM, Acer, and others had to sign the contract or ship only alternate OS’s If one sold a computer with OS/2 they also paid for a windows license.

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

#217

Post by pezezin »

TheDong wrote: post #58
deepsun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't purchase? I don't own any Apple devices, everything works fine.

Unfortunately, Apple still won't release iMessage for Android or Linux (unlike every other messenger platform, like whatsapp, telegram, wechat, microsoft teams, etc, which are all cross-platform). Because of that, you need an apple device around to be able to deal with iMessage users.

Good thing that iMessage is only popular in the US. I have never seen anybody using it, I don't even know how it looks, and if someone told me to use it I would laugh at them.

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

#218

Post by scott_w »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #193
pdpi wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows). Compare the games console market. Nintendo is allowed to say you have to go through them to sell games for the Switch, ditto Microsoft with the Xbox. Sony doing the same thing with the Playstation is exactly equivalent, but they're approaching the…

> The crucially important subtlety here is that Apple requiring developers to use the App Store doesn't leverage an existing monopoly (like what Microsoft had with Windows). Copyright (e.g. over iOS) and patent (e.g. over iPhone hardware) are explicitly government-granted monopolies. Having that monopoly is allowed on purpose, but that isn't the same as it not existing, and having a government-granted monopoly and le…

There’s no such thing as “having a monopoly on iPhone” in law. You have to have a monopoly in a market, of which iPhone is part of the “smartphone” market. It is not a monopoly in the smartphone market, to the best of my knowledge.

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

#219

Post by scott_w »

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…

There’s no such thing as “monopoly on Apple-produced processors” because that’s absurd. The monopoly for MacBook would be “consumer laptops” most likely. Apple does not have a monopoly in consumer laptops to the best of my knowledge.

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

#220

Post by nailer »

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…

> GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port

I thought Thunderbolt was like pluggable PCI? The whole point was not to limit peripherals.

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