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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

#221

Post by GeekyBear »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #194
GeekyBear wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s called “No duty to deal” https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Which is fine, right up until you:

have a product with a monopoly market share

AND

use that product as a weapon against competitors in other markets

That conduct is clearly illegal.

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

#222

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #221
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called “No duty to deal” https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Which is fine, right up until you: have a product with a monopoly market share AND use that product as a weapon against competitors in other markets That conduct is clearly illegal.

The entire idea of capitalism is to use your advantages over competitors.

But exactly how does Apple have a monopoly in computers with less than 10-15% market share?

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

#223

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #192
chongli wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible on the Mac, but it's not easy. Apple uses an immutable system volume on macOS, so you can't just delete the Safari app like you would a user-installed app. To actually delete Safari you need to disable System Integrity Protection and reboot. There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed…

> It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have. You seem to be ignoring the part where you can't install the Chome and/or Firefox browser engines on iOS and the apps with those names on that platform are just skins over Safari. Notice in particular that the iOS version of "Firefox" can't support extensions.

And that has nothing to do with the Mac…

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

#224

Post by wtallis »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #145
justincormack wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It carries pcie, but only at x4. Thunderbolt 4 is pcie gen 3 and Thunderbolt 5 is pcie gen 4.

Thats poor.. It's just copper, why can't it be as fast as a PCIe slot..

Thunderbolt is its own protocol, electrically incompatible with PCIe. Its purpose is to encapsulate data traffic from multiple other protocols (PCIe, DisplayPort, USB) and multiplex that over the same wires. It cannot function exactly like an external PCIe port because it's solving a bigger, more complicated problem.

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

#225

Post by frollogaston »

MBCook wrote: post #180
frollogaston wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eGPUs are kind of a joke. People would be way more likely to use dedicated GPUs with Macs if they had PCIe slots.

The last Mac with good PCIe slots was the 2019-2023 Mac Pro. So that’s almost a decade ago, and sold poorly. It never got a real refresh. Before that was the pre-trash can Mac Pro in 2006-2012. So that was canceled most of a decade before the 2019 model. High bandwidth PCIe hasn’t been a thing in Apple world for most of 15 years.

Yeah I want to know who exactly was their target audience with the 2013 and 2019 models. It made sense before that. I loved my 2009 model (4,1).

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

#226

Post by zamadatix »

nailer wrote: post #220
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.

There's more to peripheral limits than the protocol used. Thunderbolt connections offer higher latency and limits on bandwidth. Both, either, or neither of those things may be much of an actual problem (depending on the use case) but they are some examples of limits vs native PCIe.

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

#227

Post by trueno »

mrpippy wrote: post #99
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #21

I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.

Evidence that NVIDIA has even been trying? My understanding is that Apple didn’t allow 3rd parties to write graphics drivers past 10.13, but they could’ve done a non-graphics driver like this.

i emailed jen sen huang at the very tail end of the maxwell era and p much begged for maxwell support on macos. i didnt expect a reply, especially since i guessed his email based on some "how to find ceo emails" google search result.

he actually did reply weeks later and said "i didnt realize people wanted this, my team has added them. go check now". pretty sure that was the last time nvidia drivers came to macos.

there's a lot of assumptions made with this topic, particularly the assumption that apple is blocking them. at least in my experience the opposite was true, nvidia just flat out wasn't making them. however i don't doubt the truth lies somewhere in between: nvidia and apple have a pretty much nonexistant relationship now. i dont know whats required here but i also don't doubt apple makes this experience suck butt for any interested parties.

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

#229

Post by bigyabai »

ffsm8 wrote: post #213
embedding-shape wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FWIW Nvidia already supports UNIX OSes and AArch64 with their drivers. CUDA and CUDNN could be working overnight if Apple signed the drivers.

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

#230

Post by bigyabai »

realusername wrote: post #191
bigyabai wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's besides the point, you don't own the server. You cannot expect the server to work forever, or demand a right to access it. You do own the client though. In the example upstream, the failure to support macOS clients can't be blamed on Nvidia because they already wrote AArch64 UNIX support.

When you have a monopoly like YouTube, yes you can expect to have an access to the platform if it prevents competition. It's textbook antitrust laws.

You're going to need to cite legal precedent for that. I could not go sue HBO for monopolizing Game of Thrones and refusing to stream it in 8K to my Linux PC. There are no damages.
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