OS X Should Apple bring back eGPU support?

[diamond.g]

Oh? How is that?

Sure looks like they are making W7900 Radeon Pro 48GB cards.

And normal 7900XTX? Both are high end in their respective categories.

On the topic of drivers for newer AMD cards, they put the responsibility at Apple. I can dig out the email from AMD.

RDNA 4 reportedly doesn’t have a high end variant to go against the 5080/5090.

 

[dmccloud]

Oh? How is that?

Sure looks like they are making W7900 Radeon Pro 48GB cards.

And normal 7900XTX? Both are high end in their respective categories.

On the topic of drivers for newer AMD cards, they put the responsibility at Apple. I can dig out the email from AMD.

The W series are workstation-class cards rather than consumer/gaming focused GPUs, and AMDs strategy there is unrelated to the consumer side. On the heels of deciding not to release a 4090 competitor last year, AMD has also gone on record that they will not be going after Nvidia's flagship 5000 series parts either.

 

[avro707]

The W series are workstation-class cards rather than consumer/gaming focused GPUs, and AMDs strategy there is unrelated to the consumer side. On the heels of deciding not to release a 4090 competitor last year, AMD has also gone on record that they will not be going after Nvidia's flagship 5000 series parts either.

Apologies, it wasn't first explained that "workstation-class" cards were not "high end". They certainly are the highest end as far as price goes and in terms of specs.

The 5090 appears to be high-end on power consumption if the rumours are correct: 600w!

 

[diamond.g]

Apologies, it wasn't first explained that "workstation-class" cards were not "high end". They certainly are the highest end as far as price goes and in terms of specs.

The 5090 appears to be high-end on power consumption if the rumours are correct: 600w!

The chip it is based on matters. Aside from RAM there is no difference between an AMD workstation card and their consumer equivalent. The data center cards use a different chip (CDNA vs RDNA).

The 5090 isn’t using more power than the 4090. Power usage rumors for the cards appear to be the same, again.

 

[JordanNZ]

Steam deck

You can pick one up cheaper then an egpu enclosure/gpu and you have access to a wider array of games

With the performance of an M1 MacBook Air.

 

[descsuit]

I know everyone is focused on gaming, but what about 3D rendering and AI? Both fields are becoming very GPU-dependent and having an extra GPU around can help a lot. Adding eGPU support would really help the MacStudios and Pros make sense for 3d artists. Currently, people are using them but then offloading their rendering to second computers(PC or Linux boxes, which adds complexity) or render farms hosted on the cloud (which costs money).

 

[mi7chy]

Apple should license this product and sell it as the Big Mac (miniPC) and Apple Pie (eGPU) combo.

 

[groove-agent]

Apple should license this product and sell it as the Big Mac (miniPC) and Apple Pie (eGPU) combo.

That’s actually quite amazing. I always dreamed of something like a mini-computer that is portable but you can dock and change its functionality. In particular if we could use phones as the mobile PC, that would be ultimate theoretical setup for computing.

Also I love the Apple Pie and Big Mac names!