[7speter]

Maybe this is way too science fiction, but what are the chances Apple's GPU/AI engine designs on Apple Silicon were a testbed for full sized, dedicated GPU dies that could compete with Nvidia's power in their own data centers?

[talldayo]

Very low? I guess anything is possible, but the M1 through M4 GPUs weren't really anything to write home about. It more closely resembles AMD's raster-focused GPU compute in my opinion, which is certainly not a bad thing for mobile hardware.

Nvidia's GPUs are complex. They have a lot of dedicated, multipurpose acceleration hardware inside of them, and then they use CUDA to tie all those pieces together. Apple's GPUs are kinda the opposite way; they're extremely simple and optimized for low-power raster compute. Which isn't bad at all, for mobile! It just gimps them design-wise when they go up against purpose-built accelerators.

If we see Apple do custom Apple Silicon for the datacenter, it will be a pretty radically new design. The first thing they need is good networking; a full-size Nvidia cluster will use Mellanox Infiniband to connect dozens of servers at Tb/s speeds. So Apple would need a similar connectivity solution, at least to compete. The GPU would need to be bigger and probably higher-wattage, and the CPU should really emphasize core count over single-threaded performance. If they play their cards right there, they would have an Apple Silicon competitor to the Grace superchip and GB200 GPU.