Hello all.
I've been having some thoughts that I've been wanting to voice but I haven't been sure on how to put it and, more importantly, where. I haven't seen much discussion on this recently, so I figured I'd start a forum thread on it.
I've been thinking quite a bit about the future of the 16 inch MBP. I've heard/read several articles that state Apple plans on dropping the dedicated GPU with in the lower end macs (read: everything but the Mac Pro). I am unsure if this will actually be the case and I feel as though people may be reading too much into Apple Silicon.
This is going to be a little bit of a long post, but I'd like you stick with me for it, as I want to express all my ideas and see what others think.
Looking at the current performance of 8-core GPU, in geekbench we get a score of around 21800 or so. Looking at the 7-core GPU, we get a score of around 19800. Doing the math on this, we can see some performance loss per core of around 5% (2725 vs ~2828). Of course, GPU scaling isn't linear, but let's just assume it is. If we keep the score-per-core of the 8-core, and multiply by 32 for the presumed 32-core in the 16 inch, we'd get a score of ~87,200. Again, this is best case scenario and highly unlikely. A more realistic score would likely be high 70,000 to low 80,000.
This then brings me to the point I'm trying to make. Could an AMD GPU match that level of performance (even just ignoring performance per watt and efficiency at this point)? I am unsure. I think dedicated GPU silicon from AMD could likely get close using RDNA2 with the efficiency gains in it, but I am not sure it would be that much more powerful. This then also begs the question, would the only difference between a theoretical 14 and 16 inch Macbook Pro be largely the integrated 16 vs 32 core GPU? Would consumers still pay a 600$+ premium for a larger screen? I understand there are other benefits; larger screen, larger battery, better speakers, 32-core GPU etc, but does this justify 600$?
The way I currently see it, there's a handful of scenarios, with one particularly wild and the main point of this post, which I will get to.
1. Apple ditches AMD and is solely on Apple silicon. I'm unsure of this, as Apple has DIRECTLY stated not to assume which GPU to use when calling the rendering pipeline as an integrated GPU could perform better in a given task vs dedicated hardware. This is the biggest reason why I'm making this post.
2. Apple keeps AMD and AMD is able to compete against a 32-core integrated GPU. This begs the question of why have both?
3. This brings me to my final scenario. What I've been particularly wanting to discuss. This may sound wild, and while we haven't heard any rumors on the matter, what if Apple has developed a way to utilize both the integrated GPU AND dedicated GPU in a similar manner to what SLI/Crossfire was trying to achieve? I realize this is probably a bit crazy, since I believe that'd like need more access to the AMD drivers than AMD is likely to allow, but is this possible?
If not, which option do you think is more likely? Thanks for reading.
I've been having some thoughts that I've been wanting to voice but I haven't been sure on how to put it and, more importantly, where. I haven't seen much discussion on this recently, so I figured I'd start a forum thread on it.
I've been thinking quite a bit about the future of the 16 inch MBP. I've heard/read several articles that state Apple plans on dropping the dedicated GPU with in the lower end macs (read: everything but the Mac Pro). I am unsure if this will actually be the case and I feel as though people may be reading too much into Apple Silicon.
This is going to be a little bit of a long post, but I'd like you stick with me for it, as I want to express all my ideas and see what others think.
Looking at the current performance of 8-core GPU, in geekbench we get a score of around 21800 or so. Looking at the 7-core GPU, we get a score of around 19800. Doing the math on this, we can see some performance loss per core of around 5% (2725 vs ~2828). Of course, GPU scaling isn't linear, but let's just assume it is. If we keep the score-per-core of the 8-core, and multiply by 32 for the presumed 32-core in the 16 inch, we'd get a score of ~87,200. Again, this is best case scenario and highly unlikely. A more realistic score would likely be high 70,000 to low 80,000.
This then brings me to the point I'm trying to make. Could an AMD GPU match that level of performance (even just ignoring performance per watt and efficiency at this point)? I am unsure. I think dedicated GPU silicon from AMD could likely get close using RDNA2 with the efficiency gains in it, but I am not sure it would be that much more powerful. This then also begs the question, would the only difference between a theoretical 14 and 16 inch Macbook Pro be largely the integrated 16 vs 32 core GPU? Would consumers still pay a 600$+ premium for a larger screen? I understand there are other benefits; larger screen, larger battery, better speakers, 32-core GPU etc, but does this justify 600$?
The way I currently see it, there's a handful of scenarios, with one particularly wild and the main point of this post, which I will get to.
1. Apple ditches AMD and is solely on Apple silicon. I'm unsure of this, as Apple has DIRECTLY stated not to assume which GPU to use when calling the rendering pipeline as an integrated GPU could perform better in a given task vs dedicated hardware. This is the biggest reason why I'm making this post.
2. Apple keeps AMD and AMD is able to compete against a 32-core integrated GPU. This begs the question of why have both?
3. This brings me to my final scenario. What I've been particularly wanting to discuss. This may sound wild, and while we haven't heard any rumors on the matter, what if Apple has developed a way to utilize both the integrated GPU AND dedicated GPU in a similar manner to what SLI/Crossfire was trying to achieve? I realize this is probably a bit crazy, since I believe that'd like need more access to the AMD drivers than AMD is likely to allow, but is this possible?
If not, which option do you think is more likely? Thanks for reading.
