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by m463 14 days ago
Do macs really have GPUs though? Or are they like intel integrated graphics?
6 comments

You might want to not only re-evaluate what you consider a real GPU, but also take a look at what the latest Intel integrated graphics is capable of (Panther Lake laptop chips with 12-core GPU chiplet fabbed by TSMC). Intel is still way behind NVIDIA and AMD in the discrete graphics card market, and their drivers don't have the decades of accumulated hacks to work around badly-written games, but their good iGPUs aren't a nightmare of incompatibility and missing features like they were 15 years ago.
This is not the greatest question because it makes it seem that you think unified gpu+cpu socs are all like intel graphics.
People say they think it's faster than top of the line RTX 3070[1] and hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes, and OTOH they're like Intel integrated graphics with RAM shared VRAM for ultra thin laptops, so the truth is either of that, or somewhere between those two. Probably wherever its TDP suggests.

1: (Laptop)

> hands down the fastest GPU ever for local LLM purposes

Not really. On pure speed a 5090 will still comfortably beat a top end Mac configuration. Just constrained to 32gb mem ofc

Top Mac has mem throughput around the 900 mark while a 5090 is at 1800

Apple integrated graphics is quite good. Software is the problem.
Yes they have GPUs.
An on-board GPU is not a GPU?
It’s only a GPU if it’s made in the RTX region of Silicon Valley, otherwise it’s just sparkling floating point calculations.