Do you have comparisons for Apple’s GPU to NVIDIA’s at the same power and thermals?

Right now the M5 Max is one of the best laptop compute GPUs for blender rendering and doesn’t do too badly on raster tests either. But it operates at a fraction of the equivalent NVIDIA parts.

It’s more that Apple doesn’t provide a competing tier of device as the high end NVIDIA GPUs. But within the tiers they do provide they’re fairly competitive.

Apple (and the ARM ecosystem as a whole) has never really needed massive GPU compute before, it’s always been about power efficiency and just enough GPU oomph to make UI fluid. Even historic Mac Pro workloads never really needed tons of GPU prowess, the heaviest power users were primarily taxing video encode/decode and 2D raster effects (Adobe Suite etc) so that’s what they focused on. By contrast NVIDIA’s entire game has been raw GPU power for decades. M1 Max was really prescient in hindsight and has set the stage for, all things considered, Apple to be not as far behind as it could have been today.

The M-series are ARM chips based on the A series from the iPhones. Therefore Apple had ten years of chip design (plus the prior decades of ARM history) to rely on. The GPUs and modems were a much more recent effort.

(My take. happy to be corrected by someone with chip design experience who can comment.)

They want to be power efficient, while Nvidia doesn't. That means a much higher cost (larger chip area) for the same performance.

Maybe they are just for internal use? I doubt Apple is going back on the server market, and given how little they have invested in the Mac Pro, I doubt they are going to make a new version. There is little advantage compared to the Mac Studio for most users. External GPU support would change that, but it doesn't seem to be what they want.

Really just depends on what the market looks like in a year or two. If things stay on the current trajectory, then yeah, they won't sell this. If the AI market gets spooked and sells off, it might be available.

Whether or not this thing is commercially available though, they basically have no choice but to at least keep up the R&D spend, or they'll be even further behind once RAM availability eventually eases up.

I mean, yeah sure, we should wait and see what actually comes out, but I'm not sure I really see much reason to be skeptical.

Blackwell came out in 2024 on n4p. This article is claiming that Apple hopes to get into the same ballpark of performance as a Blackwell GPU with an M7 Ultra, which at the absolute earliest would release in 2027, but more likely 2028 or 2029, and would consist of two absolutely massive M7 Max GPUs stapled together, for a total die area bigger than a 5090, but on a smaller more advanced node.

Honestly, if they can't release something that big by 2028 that's at least competitive with a 5080, it'd be extremely embarrassing for them.

Do you really think tech gossip on capability pointing to advancements >2 years out is driving stocks? I'm sure analysts will take note, but this is just noise in a sea of sound.