So The Verge is reporting that an Apple representative confirmed that machines with Apple Silicon will continue to support Thunderbolt, which is great news. Of course it isn’t Apple directly, and no word of Thunderbolt 4 support.
Apple did help Intel develop the original Thunderbolt spec.
AppleInsider has an article on the possibility that Apple Silicon will only support their own GPU’s and not 3rd Party GPU’s. This graphics shows that Apple Silicon Mac doesn’t support NVIDIA or the currently supported AMD GPU.
This is really scary. The Apple Silicon GPU will certainly be OK for laptops or low end machines, but for high end computers this would literally be a death knell.
Let’s hope this just means for the current development system, because otherwise it means the new MacPro was a huge bait and switch. Oh look at this we can make the highest and most powerful machine, but you know at the same time they were already working on End of Life-ing that machine with Apple Silicon.
I don’t want to move to Wintel, but if their is no 3rd party GPU support, WINTEL will be the only solution.
So Apple will soon be making it’s own processors, and the next OS Big Sur supports it, but the jump to arm also comes with a change from CISC processors to RISC processors. Now Apple has updated Xcode to help software run easily and the transition is stated to not be very hard, but my question is with PCI expansion.
The MacPro’s claim to fame is it’s expansion capabilities, and that involves PCI cards. PCI card rely on much more system level drivers to get them to work, and the move from CISC to RISC will obviously mean that they are programmed differently, but to even attempt to program them developers will need hardware that has PCI slots so they can run them. The Development kit doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, so PCI support if it ever comes, may be buggy for a very long time, because how can developers even attempt to support the new hardware without having something to use to develop it on?
We are likely at least 2 years away from seeing what the high end Mac will be on Apple Silicon, and we see if PCI will even exist for it, and even if it does it may be a long haul from them to get working drivers.
Sometimes I just wish Apple was a little more transparent.
So when Apple showed off it’s new Apple Silicon chip it showed it running on what looked like Apple’s new 6K Pro Display XDR monitor in the 2020 WWDC Keynote.
That was what they showed Maya running on, and they claimed that they were running on the Apple Silicon Transition Kit, but there is a problem there.
The Transition Kit does not in fact support Thunderbolt, which is a licensed Intel Technology. So either they were running on different hardware from the transition kit, or they have hacked or new versions of the monitor capable of running off of USB C.
Either way Apple was fudging the truth a bit here.
Honestly they should have figured out a way to include Thunderbolt 3. They have previously bet so much on the technology, and if they drop it WILL HAVE HUGE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE PRO MARKET.
At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, the WWDC yesterday Apple announced that they will be moving all of their processors from Intel to Apple Silicon ARM processors in 2 years.
Rumors of this switch have been going on for years now, since Apple has been creating it’s own ARM processors for iPhones and iPads for the last 20 years. And it makes sense for their laptops for sure, since they use less power, and have better graphics than Intel’s low and mid range processors. It will mean more speed and more battery life for most laptops.
And they have brought back Rosetta which was used in the Power PC to Intel transition and showed it using Maya in their keynote. And Universal 2 will allow developers to compile versions for both Intel and Apple Silicon in a single binary. And they said Adobe is working on the transition already, so some software will certainly work, but what about other pro software, like AVID and DaVinci and all the plug ins.
My question has always been what will it mean for the high end pro market. And their are currently no high end ARM processors that match Xeon processors. And can they even support PCI cards? Hell the Dev box they are letting developers buy doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, which is an Intel technology and that all pros have moved to including me. Will none of my hard drives work on new Mac hardware ever again? That will be a huge fuck you to Pros. Was the new MacPro a hoodwink to bring pros back and then it is the last truly pro machine that Apple every releases? And all it’s vaunted upgradeability is useless because Apple will never release any new hardware for it. If so what a fucking waste. It does look like Intel is open sourcing Thunderbolt, but not having it on the first hardware is scary.
Sure it is possible that Apple plans a MacPro with Apple Silicon, but it seems unlikely, especially since they never mentioned it when they could have. Sure it would stop or slow down current sales, but it would give some assurance.
I mean it took AVID this long to get a version that works for Catalina, and it is basically a re-write that breaks all compatibility with past versions. Hopefully this switch won’t be as drastic, but who the fuck knows?
Will all plug ins need to be re-written, that is very likely, which means years for Apple to catch up again with where it is, and a huge expense as you know most will involve a cost to the end user.
And so if it turns out the high end can’t compete with Intel, and not even AMD graphics cards, Pros will be done with Apple for good. And maybe iPad’s with Keyboards will end up as the high end of macs, as it is likely that more high end software will be more easily ported since it will be on the same silicon.
So once again I come away from a WWDC more scared for Apple’s future than I was before it. Maybe Apple has solutions or maybe they will just be going for the low end portable market and dropping the high end, but that is a question I would love answered.
Sure Intel will remain supported for years, but not forever.