I would consider that for many people in your position, the desire for a discrete GPU is a proxy for the real desire, which could be one of several things:
- Performance, which apple's GPUs may compete sufficiently with
- Upgradeability, which apple's GPUs may not compete sufficiently with
If all you care about is the performance, does it really matter if that perf is achieved via a discrete or integrated GPU?
Out of curiosity, what is your benchmark here? I have a $2000 RTX card that is great for games, but pretty poor for LLMs. For LLM development, I'd be much happier with a Studio and an M2 Ultra. How much would it cost me to get 192 GB in discreet cards I wonder?
I think the statement "I'd be much happier with a Studio" is a little hypothetical? Sorry if that's not true, but everywhere I've looked, it seems like these are not ML training chips, and people are just hoping they will handle LLMs well.
You can absolutely build (with real support from the PyTorch folks) a 4x3090 deep learning workstation that has 96 GB of VRAM for roughly $7k. Or, more likely, you'll rent a A100 from AWS for ~$0.15/hr.
Bad news everyone, modeless isn't buying one. On the other hand I look forward to the steep discounts to be had at Apple's going out of business sale...
That is interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to do PCI passthrough to enable GPUs to work with Windows 11 ARM running in a VM?
I wonder if it is even possible to write a driver for an external GPU for macOS on Apple Silicon? It seems that Metal on macOS Sonoma intel still supports external GPUs.
I guess (although, I don’t actually know, low level stuff is confusing) this is an OS thing, right? Rather than hardware. Of course since it is Apple, the concept is bundled together anyway. But I wonder if Asahi Linux could bring support?
left to right, had to search a few of them. You're probably not out of it, it's just relatively niche professional stuff. Half of them are only relevant for media professionals for example.
Apple is supposed to maintain good relationships with hardware vendors and support them in porting their drivers. Apple has done a poor job of this. They are practically enemies with Nvidia due to legal disputes and as a result I don't expect to see an Nvidia driver for Apple Silicon in the foreseeable future. Maybe AMD or Intel will write one but at least one should have happened before launch.
Are they? I think you want a PC. Which is totally fine.
Microsoft goes around playing nice with every Tom, Dick and Harry with a hardware device and a dream. Apple in recent memory has never been that company.
