Mac Pro should use NVIDIA cards

[Zest28]

Seeing the latest earnings report from NVIDIA, it just shows how dominate NVIDIA currently is, nobody even comes close. Why not embrace the best technologies the industry has to offer for the Mac Pro?

Even Google who build their own custom GPU's, has embraced NVIDIA in the end. Amazon also build custom ARM chips, but they also heavily rely on NVIDIA, there is no way around it.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Apple vs. Nvidia. : What happened?

If you've been using macOS for a while, you might remember a time when Apple had both GPU options from ATI (purchased later by AMD) and Nvidia. In fact, the ...

blog.greggant.com

 

[leman]

Just buy a PC workstation with an Nvidia GPU, what is stopping you?

 

[galad]

CUDA is the elephant is the room.

 

[diamond.g]

CUDA is the elephant is the room.

I'm somewhat surprised Rosetta cannot translate CUDA to Metal.

 

[leman]

I'm somewhat surprised Rosetta cannot translate CUDA to Metal.

How would that work? 😱 It's not the same feature set.

 

[diamond.g]

How would that work? 😱 It's not the same feature set.

The same way they translate Direct3D12 to Metal?

 

[leman]

The same way they translate Direct3D12 to Metal?

There is much more overlap between DX12 and Metal than between CUDA and Metal. CUDA supports things which cannot be currently expressed in Metal.

 

[NT1440]

This thread is calling for the entire industry to put all their eggs in the Nvidia basket because “number go up”?

This fundamental misuse of the marketing term “AI” is going to come crumbling down in a few quarters when people realize this is the same cycle that blockchain, “machine learning”, and crypto has gone down.

Apparently the world learns nothing from every bubble bursting….

AI has its place, but the decrees from above that this is going to transform everything is just a load of ****. There’s no intelligence here, just fancy applied statistics. It’s a great *tool* for certain tasks, but the claims coming from those *who have an economic interest in this being the Next Big Thing* are just that, short term stock bumping.

Nearly every AI company is funded through SPACs. Meaning they’re just a quick way to separate fools from their money.

 

[diamond.g]

There is much more overlap between DX12 and Metal than between CUDA and Metal. CUDA supports things which cannot be currently expressed in Metal.

Have you had a chance to look at ZLUDA?

 

[Xiao_Xi]

CUDA supports things which cannot be currently expressed in Metal.

Could you list some of them and explain how difficult it might be for Apple to implement them?

Have you had a chance to look at ZLUDA?

AMD is still reluctant to port CUDA code to its GPUs. It is not yet clear whether it could be legal.

Software allows CUDA code to run on AMD and Intel GPUs without changes — ZLUDA is back but both companies ditched it, nixing future updates

After Intel and AMD passed on it, ZLUDA is probably dead in the water.

www.tomshardware.com

CUDA is becoming less important in machine learning.

How Nvidia’s CUDA Monopoly In Machine Learning Is Breaking - OpenAI Triton And PyTorch 2.0

Over the last decade, the landscape of machine learning software development has undergone significant changes. Many frameworks have come and gone, but most have relied heavily on leveraging Nvidia's CUDA and performed best on Nvidia GPUs. However, with the arrival of PyTorch 2.0 and OpenAI's...

www.semianalysis.com

 

[Regulus67]

I find it amusing. How would Apple start supporting nVidia again, when they even ditched their long tradition supporting AMD?
From my read on the situation, Apple is comfortable focusing the research and development on their own chips, period. And it does not matter to Apple, that part of the customer base relied on the graphical capabilities of other producers.

Even if I prefer the older Intel era macs. I can very well imagine that several years from now, that I too will be happy to purchase a mac based on future versions of the Apple M-series.

 

[Regulus67]

What about the Apple R1 processor? Is that part of a new graphics path that Apple will focus on instead?

 

[leman]

Have you had a chance to look at ZLUDA?

It is possible that AMD can support most of CUDA feature set in hardware, I don’t know.

Could you list some of them and explain how difficult it might be for Apple to implement them?

From the top of my head:

- unified virtual memory: not in Metal, unclear if possible on current Apple hardware
- parallel forward progress guarantees: not in Metal, unclear if possible on current Apple hardware
- work synchronization between different thread groups: not supported on Apple hardware
- acquire/release atomic semantics - not in Metal, not supported by M1/M2, unknown if supported by M3

 

[leman]

What about the Apple R1 processor? Is that part of a new graphics path that Apple will focus on instead?

I am not aware of R1 having any graphical function.

 

[hagjohn]

Seeing the latest earnings report from NVIDIA, it just shows how dominate NVIDIA currently is, nobody even comes close. Why not embrace the best technologies the industry has to offer for the Mac Pro?

Even Google who build their own custom GPU's, has embraced NVIDIA in the end. Amazon also build custom ARM chips, but they also heavily rely on NVIDIA, there is no way around it.

Nvidia is dominating the AI chip market, at the moment, which is why their earnings are so high.

 

[turbineseaplane]

No kidding..

I recently got a 4070 Super FE

What an absolute beast (totally sweet industrial design also)

It's hilarious to me that some folks (like Rene Ritchie) were claiming that Apple was going to trounce NVIDIA on GPUs

Yeah -- umm... "no" and it's not close

 

[leman]

It's hilarious to me that some folks (like Rene Ritchie) were claiming that Apple was going to trounce NVIDIA on GPUs

Yeah -- umm... "no" and it's not close

Apple currently has a lead in performance of around 30-40% at the same power. It’s just that Apple focuses on low-power mobile GPUs by the industry standards. Technology-wise, Apple currently progresses faster than Nvidia. We will see what the next couple of years will bring.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Apple currently has a lead in performance of around 30-40% at the same power. It’s just that Apple focuses on low-power mobile GPUs by the industry standards. Technology-wise, Apple currently progresses faster than Nvidia. We will see what the next couple of years will bring.

"at the same power" is great if worried about laptops

When one wants to get big things done with GPUs, usually it's a desktop and the power efficiency is way down the list. I'm not saying it means nothing, but it's not near the top of the list.

I get that Apple wants something to tout - good for them - but they are getting killed on the desktop side of just having "the best"

(we are already 4 years into ASi .. how many years to we have to wait for them to "win"?)

 

[turbineseaplane]

From a customer standpoint ...

Wouldn't we just prefer they supported NVIDIA cards so that we could use "the best"?

It's intensely annoying to have them get in pissing matches with competitors and then just try to do it all themselves.

The customer loses in that scenario

 

[leman]

When one wants to get big things done with GPUs, usually it's a desktop and the power efficiency is way down the list. I'm not saying it means nothing, but it's not near the top of the list.

And there are plenty of tools and means to do it.

I get that Apple wants something to tout - good for them - but they are getting killed on the desktop side of just having "the best"

(we are already 4 years into ASi .. how many years to we have to wait for them to "win"?)

Things constantly change in the industry. This is not about “winning” today, this is about creating a sustainable ecosystem. Whether Apples strategy will be successful or not, time will tell. Maybe you don’t remember, but Nvidia was considered an underdog in the GPU sector merely 20 years ago. Similarly, five years ago the very idea of Apple shipping a fast GPU was entirely ridiculous. Today they ship some of the fastest GPUs in their power brackets, and with largest memory pools. And they have delivered 30-40% improvement in complex GPU workloads in a single generation without increasing clocks or memory bandwidth, which is a big thing.

From a customer standpoint ...

Wouldn't we just prefer they supported NVIDIA cards so that we could use "the best"?

It's intensely annoying to have them get in pissing matches with competitors and then just try to do it all themselves.

The customer loses in that scenario

I don’t see it this way. The customer can get the product they need. If you are in ML research for example it would be silly to get anything else but Nvidia (although Apple Silicon also has advantages if you work with large models). As a customer and GPU enthusiast I really don’t want Nvidia to be the only GPU vendor out there. Their products are brilliant and state of the art, but I dislike their wasteful design philosophy and how they manipulated the open source agencies to establish a dominant market position. Competition is good. We need pluralism of design approaches and ideas, not a single behemoth trampling everyone else.

 

[Elusi]

I also love my shiny new 4070 Super FE. I kinda feel an urge switching to a Fractal North case in order not to embarrass that good looking thing.

I think Apple is done with chasing the highest possible performance segment. They will push their design to its limits and what it can do there will be good enough for the products they're selling.

The ones getting snubbed the most I must assume are gamers. But.. nothing new here. If you want a Nvidia GPU simply because of its GPGPU-compute capabilities, you can still buy it, stick it in a PC and then access that processing power from your Mac.

 

[leman]

The ones getting snubbed the most I must assume are gamers.

Apple GPUs punch way above their weight when it comes to gaming. It’s the lack of games that’s the issue. Where the performance deficit of Apple GPUs is felt most is machine learning and rendering. M3 Max can compete with mid-range Nvidia laptops, but the price point is not to Apples advantage. I expect Apple to keep pushing the power envelope on laptops until they have performance parity or even superiority with Nvidia. Desktop - no idea - although I tend to agree with your skepticism that we will see too much in this segment.

 

[BenGoren]

Nvidia’s recent surge is in the LLM world, which is 99 44/100 % rack-mount servers in data centers.

If you’re doing stuff in that area, you really do need massive arrays of GPUs to function. And Apple is not making hardware for that market — the same way that, for example, Ford doesn’t make jet engines for aircraft (even though Rolls Royce does).

With a footnote for the PC gaming world, the types of things you’d use GPUs for on a single-person computer work (within rounding) equally well on any of the GPU platforms out there.

And, if you need more than you can readily get in a single-person computer … these days, you’re using a cloud provider to do the number crunching for you. Far cheaper and easier to work with.

There might be another footnote in there for developers who create toy models on their workstations before deploying them to the cloud … but even that’s hard to justify these days. Do your development in the cloud with a small data set and deploy with the full set; much easer and — again — cheaper than buying a massively-specced computer to do stuff locally.

b&

 

[sunny5]

Seeing the latest earnings report from NVIDIA, it just shows how dominate NVIDIA currently is, nobody even comes close. Why not embrace the best technologies the industry has to offer for the Mac Pro?

Even Google who build their own custom GPU's, has embraced NVIDIA in the end. Amazon also build custom ARM chips, but they also heavily rely on NVIDIA, there is no way around it.

Apple Silicon itself has proven that it's not good for professionals with high specs just like workstation. Mac Pro will die and I dont think Apple is interested in professional markets at all. Sadly, it will affect Mac's major markets such as video and music due to the hardware limitation.

Truth be told, Apple CAN create their own markets but their GPU performance is dramatically poor and many software aren't even interested in Mac at all. There are so many issues with macOS and Mac itself so as long as Apple is being stubborn, I dont think it's gonna be solved. They are limiting themselves too much and it won't work like iPhone's iOS.

At this point, the pro market will die slowly.