Apple to Reportedly Remove AMD GPU Support From macOS ARM64, Paving the Way for Custom GPUs

Omar Sohail
Apple to Reportedly Remove AMD GPU Support From macOS ARM64, Paving the Way for Custom GPUs

Apple’s transition from Intel to its custom A-series chips was given a little sneak preview at this year’s WWDC 2020 keynote, laying the foundation of future Macs to use the tech giant’s own hardware. From the look of things, it looks like Apple is planning to go all-in, possibly going as far as developing its custom GPUs, according to the latest tweet.

Lack of Third-Party GPU Support Will Eventually Mean Lack of eGPU on Portable Macs

An image shared by Twitter user Longhorn highlights the fact that future ARM-based Macs will use an ‘Apple GPU’ which only gives rise to the speculation that the company will end up using a custom solution here too. For three generations now, starting with the A11 Bionic, Apple utilized its custom GPU microarchitecture over Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR solutions, and the same approach could be followed here.

Related Story BOE Allegedly Outpriced Samsung To Win iPhone SE 4 OLED Orders From Apple

The very first example of how capable Apple’s GPU can be is represented in a previous benchmark test, where the A12Z Bionic’s 8-core GPU beat both the iGPUs of the Ryzen 5 4500U and the Core i7-1065G7 but only marginally in an OpenCL test.

It’s possible that those low scores obtained by the A12Z Bionic were due to Apple’s translation layer Rosetta 2, as another benchmark report revealed that the chipset’s performance cores were only being utilized, not the efficiency cores. Fortunately, the A12Z Bionic isn’t going to be found in a future consumer-based Mac; it’s only present in the Mac mini and meant for developers to test out their apps.

The first ARM-based Mac for customers is set to arrive later this year, with reports claiming that it will be a custom 12-core SoC, where there will be eight performance cores paired with four efficiency ones. This unnamed 12-core custom A-series silicon might sport an even more capable GPU than the one found in the upcoming iPhone 12’s A14 Bionic.

Of course, we’ll only find out more details in the coming months, but the prospect of seeing custom Apple GPUs in action does excite us. Do you share the same sentiment? Let us know down in the comments.

News Source: Twitter (Longhorn)

Share this story

Deal of the Day

Comments