Has anyone heard any rumours of an updated Afterburner card for the 8,1? I'm presuming we'll see something in that vein (to trounce the video encoding/decoding edge that the M1 Max has at the moment).
Pretty decent chance that Afterburner was more so a R&D prototype mechanism for what is now in the M1 Pro/Max. Apple isn't running a "contest" between MBP and Mac Pros. The software library calls to invoke the embedded ProRes decoder in Afterburner and new hardwired implementation is probably the same for decode.
If so , then part of the Afterburner buy-in price was to participate in the 'beta' program. There is no long term horizon there when the finished hardwired solution starts shipping.
Apple didn't do full benchmarks in the "as many 8K ProRes RAW" streams possible. Apple mainly focused on 'plain' ProRes 442 . So pretty good chance that there isn't a decoding edge for the new implementation (at least on multicam matrix presentation on a single screen). ( and still may not even if get multiple chip modules. Depends upon the interchip bisection bandwidth. ) . I suspect the hardwired ones can do a 8k ProRes RAW but not quite as many concurrent ones. So there would still be a functionality gap at the very high end.
[ Apple's hardwired encode probably leans a bit on the NPU cores to do part of the work. The two sets of fixed function logic are closely coupled on the die. and the second encode unit also has another NPU cluster. That doesn't bode well for a encode FPGA solution (would need more gates than have now ) . Or some specific ASIC. ]
I'm thinking it would be a nice option to keep the 7,1 as competitive as possible.
Probably not. If there is a specific niche that a two or four die ( Jade2C , Jade4c) M1 Max Duo/Quattour would be quite good at is the user base that have high value match to the Afterburner deployments. If the duo still has two, but the quattour has four ProRes en/decoders then the latter is close to one top of where the Afterburner is. If Apple is calling that new system "Mac Pro" then doubtful they'll be trying to create a competitor to that. It will essentially come with an "Afterburner" built into the basic system price and also be a better regular ProRes to H.264/265 transcoder.
Furthermore, to get some substantive edge over the hardwired four en/decode solution ( e.g., 6 ProRes RAW 4K decodes ) the bandwidth to the Afterburner card would need to change. Something like PCI-e v4 x16. If Apple shipped another Intel Mac Pro ( W-3300 series) then maybe that system would get something that had some "uplift". But in that case, probably wouldn't see much uplift with a W-3200 model (2019).
