$30k-$50k? This feels kind of like a straw man argument. Doubling the number of cores would not cost another $20k.
The $50K part yes. A huge chunk of that is Apple RAM mark-up charges can never get to on Apple Silicon because the capacity is chopped down so far. But in denial that Apple wasn't salivating over the lotto ticketing wining revenues from the small number of customers who selected it. Apple could have cut costs on the MP 2019 by just skipping Intel's ">1 TB RAM tax" all together with zero hit on max CPU core count. They didn't. Apple
blocked that cheaper option. So yeah, I left that on the table. Apple's
greed for the $50K margins is one of the problems the MP 2019 had that they are backing away from on the MP 2023.
if need actual chiplets to get to that doubling it would cost more. Either only using those chiplets on the Extreme which dramatics impacts economies of scale. ( custom chips for a very small volume) . "Too expensive" was the rumored major contributing cause to why the Extreme was abandoned. It wasn't because they didn't get it to work.
Throw in pragmatically have to raise the floor of the RAM capacity at Apple's prices.
Who said anything about an MPX module?
They could do drivers for generic 7900s.
So cards that aren't sold on Apple Store and Apple collects no revenues for are going to get drivers? I don't see where Apple , AMD , or any actual card vendor collects up revenues to pay for this. The nominal Widows cards are contributing to paying for Windows drivers; not Mac drivers.
If Apple were to sell a card only for the Intel Mac Pro getting the Apple design team to put AUX power wires on it would be a challenge. [ New Apple product needs for GPU driving new drivers being done. Revues from those products go into paying for those drivers. That is standard modus operandi at Apple. The margins are so 'fat' on MPX modules that getting to breakeven in a year probably is doable. Won't make money, but wouldn't loose it either. ]
If trying to get ASUS, MSI, Sapphire to make a "Mac marketed" card then the MP 2019 is dead as far as unit volume growth. Signing up for a suicide mission? Probably not. Margins are already pretty poor in the general GPU card business and card with negative target market growth is just a way to loose money faster.
If skipping both of the above, basically backpedaling here to aiming at pure reference design cards where not really looping in the card vendors at all. Not really looping in Apple synergies much at all. And AMD throwing minimal effort just to get something out the door at lowest possible cost because given the smallest possible budget to complete the task. And then do 2-3 years of bugs fixes with an even more meager maintenance budget because there is no revenue source here at all.
If Apple was still selling the MP 2019 and/or the cards could work in the MP 2023 there would be some possible target market growth potential. I could see the point because Apple would pick a card (certify it) and sell it on the Apple Store ( like they sell J2i outside the MP BTO page).
AMD's 7700 and 7800 GPUs are stalled on release in part due to the large glut of 6800 cards out there in the inventory. The "buy upgrades much later because they are cheaper" crowd is mainly going to get the 6800's. And when 7900's get 'cheaper' the MP 2019 will be really close to being de-supported.
In the general market, the 7900 is mainly aimed at the 5000/Vega , 4000 , 3000 folks, not the 6000 folks. There is a 6900->7900 upgrade group that moves quicker , but it is substantively smaller. So really doing 'for free' drivers for even much smaller group than the MP 2019 user base. ( quite similar to the "hardly anybody is up there" $30-50K group. )
Vulkan on Apple Silicon really doesn't make much sense when you look deeper into it. At best - you're going to end up with a bunch of apps that are badly optimized for Apple Silicon because they weren't written with TBDR in mind.
Rosetta apps run sub-optimially and yet there are present on Apple Silicon. There are headless , but highly useful apps that could run on macOS. It just looking at maximum number of apps then yeah if Apple could suck all of the other Apple store apps they would increase the total aggregate quantity. Some applications are willing to trade some small amount of performance to lower total aggregate porting costs. There is a huge number of Electron apps floating around on Macs . Do they squeeze maximum performance out of Apple GPUs? Nope.
There really isn't a huge impedance mismatch with Vulkan and Metal. Apple had to jump into Blender because the "throw everything Khronos in the trash can" blew up Blender's limited budget long term porting plan. If Apple wants to jump in and cover every limited budget open source app that was planning to use Vulkan to lower porting cost then fine. But I wouldn't hold my breath on them spending that kind of money.
I'm not saying that Apple has to take control of the whole MoltenVK source code base. Just that interface bottlenecks or bugs in the interface to Metal that have a root cause presence on the Metal "half" of the interface shouldn't get lost in a "pfttt, doesn't matter' bug queue where Apple just blows it off forever. Should be better than the minimalistic Tier 1 support that Apple generally provides.
The more Apple is hugely anti open everything on graphics stack code the more and more Nvidia/AMD/Intel are going to point at Apple and say "they're a bigger 'embrace , extend, extinguish' player than Nvidia." and that isn't going to help Apple over the long term.
Vulkan made more sense when you could take Vulkan code written for a discrete GPU with discrete memory and run it on a Mac with a discrete GPU and discrete memory. No point anymore with Apple Silicon.
Vulkan makes more sense if trying to control portability costs. That is mainly it. Imagination Tech had Vulkan working on their iGPU. Other people's port budgets don't grow on Apple's whims. Pushing folks up onto 'taller/thicker' porting layers for folks controlling porting costs only increases the distance away from Metal. That isn't going to necessarily improve performance either. The commercial , "for pay" frameworks/engines then probably less. The frameworks on a budget , probably not.
Apple likes to point at iOS as being the big elephant in the room with Metal. Well, Android has what alternative to Vulkan? And it is also a big elephant in the larger room. If Apple is just 'wishing' Vulkan into oblivion, that is probably drinking Cupertino kool-aid.