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by spijdar 2041 days ago
Unfortunately it looks like they're taking the opposite approach, and phasing out even AMD drivers, with eGPUs apparently (?) not supported on M1 devices. It seems they want to phase out all non Metal APIs.

(Which is to say, I bet the return of eGPUs on mac will only happen if apple releases a discrete Metal-based GPU)

It makes sense, so far as it means they can further integrate hardware solutions they make themselves and not deal with a higher level driver interfaces. Otherwise they'll be limited to incorporating features present in all supported vendors.
2 comments
osy 2041 days ago
> and phasing out even AMD drivers, with eGPUs apparently (?) not supported on M1 devices. It seems they want to phase out all non Metal APIs.

That doesn’t make sense as Metal APIs are implemented on top of the graphics drivers. There’s Metal drivers for AS, Intel iGPU, and AMD. The last two are not built for arm64. On AMD’s side it would require work from AMD as most of the driver is shared code from Windows. I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes in the future.

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spijdar 2040 days ago
You're right -- I didn't mean to imply that's why eGPUs aren't supported right now, I meant I suspect it's a policy change, and Apple plans to move to more integrated drivers in the future, so in "Courage!" fashion, they've preemptively ditched it.

I can't imagine there's a hard technical reason why they couldn't support eGPUs. I've used both AMD and nvidia Linux drivers on a ppc64le workstation -- I'd be surprised if porting to darwin/arm64 was that much work. Their endianness matches -- though the difference in page sizes might be a problem. On Linux, some drivers just assume 4kb page sizes, and updating them is really difficult[1]. But AMD and Intel GPU drivers are fine with non-4kb at least, so...

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94757

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X-Istence 2040 days ago
I think part of the issue with the eGPU as mentioned in the forum post that is linked is that the drivers haven't been compiled for arm64. So maybe they will bring it back once the drivers are stable enough?
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