Apple Ditches Nvidia And AMD Uses Metal GPU in Macs

Not only Intel will be affected by the change in the hardware platform of Apple computers. The suppliers of the graphics chips AMD and Nvidia also fly out of their Macs with their products, as can be seen from presentations from the developer conference WWDC.

The developer system that Apple is currently publishing is equipped with an A12Z chip, which is already used in the iPad Pro systems. This also contains its own graphics unit. In terms of performance, this is roughly at the level that the integrated graphics cores of the Intel and AMD CPUs can demonstrate. However, it is certain that the first Macs with an in-house SoC will be significantly more powerful.

This must also be done because the statements in the presentations make it clear that Apple does not only want to work with its own graphics unit in the “smaller” Macs, but in all systems. This means that you have to offer enough performance to satisfy even the more demanding users in the pro segment who earn their income from graphics and video editing and other GPU-heavy work.

Optimized for metal

However, the request could benefit from the fact that you can then offer everything from a single source in this area. The company’s own graphics unit, or the likely different versions of it, will be optimized for the Metal graphics platform, which was also developed by Apple. This offers fairly direct access to the GPU, which makes the braking superstructure noticeably slimmer.

As with the graphics units in the iPhone and iPad SoCs, the GPU in the ARM Macs will be based on the architecture of Imagination Technologies. This also means that a different concept is used here than for the graphics processors from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. The Tile-Based Deferred Renderer does not work on a complete frame, but breaks it down again into individual tiles, breaking the computing operations down to a lower level.