I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.
The same way Google evaded regulatory scrutiny for refusing to allow a YouTube client for Windows Phone?
Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
31–40 of 262 posts
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for starters, PCIe 5.0 x16 would do something like about 60 GB/s each way, while Thunderbolt 4 does 4 GB/s each way, TB 5 does 8 GB/s each way. If you don't actually hit the bandwidth limits, it obviously matters less. Whether you'd notice a large difference would depends heavily on the type of workload.
I think you missed a zero, TB5 does 80GB/s.
[deleted]
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for starters, PCIe 5.0 x16 would do something like about 60 GB/s each way, while Thunderbolt 4 does 4 GB/s each way, TB 5 does 8 GB/s each way. If you don't actually hit the bandwidth limits, it obviously matters less. Whether you'd notice a large difference would depends heavily on the type of workload.
I think you missed a zero, TB5 does 80GB/s.
[deleted]
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple got out of the server game long before they adopted aarch64, so that's a trillion worth of server hardware they never would have sold anyway. And probably not actually a trillion.
Apple was the only one stopping themselves from getting back in. It's not like the Mac is a trillion-dollar market segment to begin with.
Almost everyone including myself had MacBook Pros at my last place of work.
If Apple was in the high-end server market, I see no reason why the company I was working for would not be running macOS on Apple hardware as servers, instead of the fleet of Linux based servers they had.
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I’m lacking imagination. But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute? The interconnect isn’t powerful enough to change layers on the GPU rapidly, I guess?
> But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute? It would work just like a discrete GPU when doing CPU+GPU inference: you'd run a few shared layers on the discrete GPU and place the rest in unified memory. You'd want to minimize CPU/GPU transfers even more than usual, since a Thunderbolt connection only gives you equivalent throughput to PCI…
But isn’t the Mac Mini the weak link in that scenario?
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#36Idk why this doesn't link to the original source instead of this proxy source: https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute? It would work just like a discrete GPU when doing CPU+GPU inference: you'd run a few shared layers on the discrete GPU and place the rest in unified memory. You'd want to minimize CPU/GPU transfers even more than usual, since a Thunderbolt connection only gives you equivalent throughput to PCI…
But isn’t the Mac Mini the weak link in that scenario?
It has way more unified memory than your typical dGPU.
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#38I'm writing scientific software that has components (molecular dynamics) that are much faster on GPU. I'm using CUDA only, as it's the eaisiest to code for. I'd assumed this meant no-go on ARM Macs. Does this news make that false?
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've seen many recent projects to stream models direct from SSD to a discrete GPU's limited VRAM on PCs. How big a bottleneck is Thunderbolt 5 compared to an SSD? Is the 120 Gbps mode only available when linked to a monitor?
That’s what, 14GB/s? The GPU‘s VRAM can do 100x that.
A discrete consumer GPU card doesn't have enough fast RAM to run a very large model that hasn't been quanitized to hell.
That's why all the projects streaming models into the GPU from an SSD popped up recently.
Re: Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs
#40Such a shame both companies are big on vanity to make great things happen. Imagine where you could run Mac hardware with nvidia on linux. It's all there, and closed walls are what's not allowing it to happen. That's what we as customers lose when we forego control of what we purchase to those that sold us the goods.