Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

M1 Mac with eGPU / Thunderbolt Peripheral?

A

Amethyst

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2006
601
294
This two question remain unknown.

Can we use M1 Mac with existing eGPU box?
Can we use M1 Mac with Thunderbolt Peripheral?

Do your guy think?
 
P

petterihiisila

macrumors 6502
Nov 7, 2010
404
304
Finland
Looking at Blackmagic eGPU page: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HM8Y2VC/A/blackmagic-egpu

Compatibility
  • MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
  • ...
  • Mac mini (M1, 2020)
Macbook Air is not mentioned. Someone took the time to update the eGPU page with the M1 models for MBP and Mini. I hope they're still there tomorrow.

Source: https://egpu.io/forums/which-gear-s...1-what-will-this-mean-for-egpu-users/paged/8/

The same forum also says that the AMD drivers in Big Sur RC2 aren't universal binaries, Intel only.

These two latest data points are polar opposites. One explicitly says that M1 supports (at least) Blackmagic; but no driver in latest Big Sur. This definitely "a developing story" as they say.

Edit: One more conflicting data point: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/macs-with-the-m1-chip-do-not-support-egpus/

"Apple’s first Macs built around its self-developed SoC do not support eGPUs, Apple tells TechCrunch"

And yet 2 out of 3 M1 Macs are mentioned in Blackmagic Compatibility list, at Apple.com. Go figure.
 
DreamPod

DreamPod

macrumors 65816
Mar 15, 2008
1,265
188
Apple "Specialist" support chat told me that the M1 Mac Mini was compatible with most eGPUs...take that how you will...
 
R

redpandadev

macrumors 6502
Jun 3, 2014
353
318
I suspect that this is a driver issue much more than it is a hardware issue. In order for eGPUs to work, they will need native AMD drivers. There is currently no ARM support for AMD or Nvidia graphics cards, even in the Linux world - other than buggy and poor performing open source drivers (a road which Apple would never go down). Give it some time - proper drivers may happen. Apple may also surprise you and shake up the GPU industry as well with a discreet option, or an integrated option that beats nearly any discreet option.
 
  • Like
Reactions: senna95 and petterihiisila
B

Brian Y

macrumors 68040
Oct 21, 2012
3,776
1,064
I agree with @redpandadev

I have a feeling this is coming down to drivers. As far as I know, there are no ARM drivers for either NVidia or AMD drivers on MacOS yet.
 
M

mlauria93

macrumors newbie
Jan 24, 2014
3
0
Brian Y said:
I agree with @redpandadev

I have a feeling this is coming down to drivers. As far as I know, there are no ARM drivers for either NVidia or AMD drivers on MacOS yet.
Click to expand...
Are you sure about this? See:
[The video shows a Linux ARM-based system exploiting an AMD gpu for gaming (basic stuff).]


I'm no expert but I think it has something to do with the M1 controllers set, some of them might be proprietary of Intel (or other companies) and Apple might have decided not to pay them. Here's what I thought so far:
1) The mentioned controllers set is not on the M1 and Apple screwed it up, so no eGPU support for this generation macs, we should hope for next-gen macs to have these missing controllers.
2) It is actually a Driver problem so, future macOS will allow this lineup to use eGPU. But, I really doubt this because they have thousands of developers at disposal, not to talk about the amount of spendable cash Apple has.
3) It is just this gen problem, it will be assessed on pro-er models or next-gen M2 chips.
4) Let's just wait for this products to come out, maybe they will support it, somebody just forgot to add the Blackmagic eGPU in the supported devices (?).
5) Lastly and sadly, it could be that Apple is dropping the eGPU support because the M1's performance could be enough to play games within the iOS environment (we'll see). But say goodbye to any triple-A game dream (at least for the next few years).

Even if I bought an eGPU last summer, I think that they would go with the last option for two reasons, firstly is that the GPUs are optimized to cooperate with an x86 architecture, secondly, if these chips don't support an eGPU that could be the end of it, and I don't imagine the possibility of a future tv to have support for eGPUs, could you imagine that though? The lack of this support will inevitably lead whoever wants to play games (at a certain level) to buy the pro-er models or the next-gen M chip.

I think that most of the $500+ millions invested in gaming are mainly spent to develop strongly-optimized games for A (and M) series processors. All these ARM-based processors are not going to achieve my RX5800, not in the next couple of years…

What mainly pisses me off is that I bought the eGPU to do other things than gaming, but, even if apple announced that M1 is supporting TensorFlow, I'm quite sure that it won't be able to outperform a big GPU's performance.

Hope this transition will be more inclusive for gaming because for the money we spend to buy Apple products we should have more than crappy Nintendo-like games.
 
L

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,520
19,669
There are more thoughts and observations in this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-arm-macs-with-egpu.2266888/

In particular, if I may so bold, I would like to copy my post from there

Here is my take on this.

Technically, there is no reason why eGPU support would be impossible. This is the question of drivers. However, I don't think we will ever get them. And the reason is software infrastructure.

With M1, Apple is offering unified GPU programming experience and a set of strong guarantees as to which features the GPU will support and how it will behave. It gives developers a very solid and concise base to work with, not to mention some truly revolutionary stuff like unified memory on the consumer desktop. A third-party eGPU would break these guarantees and make mess a mess out of things.

Some additional points to consider:

- very high support cost for a niche feature (drivers need to be written and maintained — it's "included " on Intel Macs, but a separate effort for ARM Macs)
- eGPU is arguably less relevant for the Apple Silicon Macs as the internal GPU with unified memory is likely to be better for content creation anyway and M1 offers more then adequate gaming performance (and no Windows support, with cuts out another large user base)
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom