Idk why this doesn't link to the original source instead of this proxy source: <a href="https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736</a>
Probably because you can't actually read anything more than the initial post without getting a login-wall: "Join X now to read replies on this post." (Not to mention "X" is a trash site now)
I don't go there unless I'm looking for something specific but I've found adding cancel at the end helps<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736</a>
I mean, just setup redirector extension and never think about it again.<p>Redirect: <a href="https://x.com/*" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/*</a><p>to: <a href="https://xcancel.com/$1" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/$1</a>
<a href="https://xcancel.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/__tinygrad__/status/2039213719155310736</a>
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Isn't X usually the original source these days?
A good technical project, but honestly useless in like 90% of scenarios.<p>You want to use an NVidia GPU for LLM ? just buy a basic PC on second hand (the GPU is the primary cost anyway), you want to use Mac for good amount of VRAM ? Buy a Mac.<p>With this proposed solution you have an half-backed system, the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port and you don’t have access to all of NVidia tool and library, and on other hand you have a system who doesn’t have the integration of native solution like MLX and a risk of breakage in future macOS update.
Chicken/egg. NVidia tooling is lacking surely in part because the hardware wasn’t usable on macOS until now. Now that it’s usable that might change.
Nvidia GPUs were usable on Intel Macs, but compatibility got worse over time, and Apple stopped making a Mac Pro with regular PCIe slots in 2013. People then got hopeful about eGPUs, but they have their own caveats on top of macOS only fully working with AMD cards. So I've gotten numb to any news about Mac + GPU. The answer was always to just get a non-Apple PC with PCIe slots instead of giving yourself hoops to jump through.
Until there is official support for Mac coming from nvidia, I don't think anything will happen.<p>> the hardware wasn't usable on macOS<p>This eGPU thing is from a third-party if I understand correctly. I don't see why nvidia would get excited about that. If they cared about the platform, they would have released something already.
Nvidia tooling like CUDA has worked on AArch64 UNIX-certified OSes since June of 2020: <a href="https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/" rel="nofollow">https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/</a><p>The software stack has been ready for Apple Silicon for more than a half decade.
There's a third option that might fit some of the "I'm on a Mac but need CUDA" cases: network-mounting an Nvidia GPU from another machine on the same LAN. The GPU stays wherever it lives (office server, lab machine, a roommate's PC), your Mac runs the CUDA workload locally without any code changes — same PyTorch/CUDA calls, just intercepted by a stub library that forwards them over the local network.<p>The tradeoff vs. a physical eGPU: no Thunderbolt bandwidth ceiling or cabling, but you do need to be on the same LAN and there's ~4% overhead vs. native. Doesn't help if you need the GPU while traveling, and won't fix the physical macOS driver situation for native GPU access.<p>Disclosure: I work on GPU Go (tensor-fusion.ai/products/gpu-go), so I'm obviously biased toward this approach — but it genuinely is a different point in the design space from eGPU.
I misunderstood eGPU for virtual GPU. But I was wrong it means external GPU.
From what I understand, only works with Tinygrad. Which is better than nothing but CUDA or Vulkan on pytorch isn’t going to work from this.<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/</a>
I don't know how Apple has evaded regulatory scrutiny for their refusal to sign Nvidia's eGPU drivers since 2018.
Evidence that NVIDIA has even been trying? My understanding is that Apple didn’t allow 3rd parties to write graphics drivers past 10.13, but they could’ve done a non-graphics driver like this.
The government doesn’t care? They’re a minority of the market? The vast majority of their computers didn’t have slots to put Nvidia GPUs in, and now none of them do?
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in any market they are in.
It depends how you define the market. In the 2001 microsoft case [0], the courts ruled Microsoft had a monopoly over the "Intel-based personal computer market".<p>Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store. They have a monopoly over the driver market on macOS.<p>Like, Microsoft was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly for installing IE by default while still allowing other browser engines. On iOS, apple bundles safari by default and doesn't allow other browser engines.<p>If we apply the same standard that found MS a monopoly in the past, then Apple is obviously a monopoly, so at the very least I think it's fair to say that reasonable people can disagree about whether Apple is a monopoly or not.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...</a>.
I wouldn’t say it is obvious. Apple does not have the monopoly of ARM based PCs. Labeling it as a monopoly of M chips is not fair or accurate when comparing to MS on Intel. It’s also probably relevant that MS was not selling PCs or their own hardware. They had a monopoly on a market where you effectively had to use their software to use the hardware you bought from a different company. Because Apple is selling their own hardware and software as a single product, the consumer is not forced into restricting the hardware they bought by a second company’s policies.
Well “had to use” is a strong phrase here. Linux was already around and you could have used it too with your hardware. I think you can always bend an argument to fit your point.
> Labeling it as a monopoly of M chips is not fair or accurate when comparing to MS on Intel.<p>The relevant thing here isn't the chips, it's tying things to the chips, because those would otherwise be separate markets. If you could feasibly buy an iPhone and install Android or Lineage OS on it or use Google Play or F-Droid on iOS then no one would be saying that Apple has a monopoly on operating systems or app stores for iOS since there would actually be alternatives to theirs.<p>The fake alternative is that you could use a different store by buying a different phone, but this is like saying that if Toyota is the only one who can change the brake pads on a Toyota and Ford is the only one who can change the brake pads on a Ford then there is competition for "brake pads" because when your Toyota needs new brake pads you can just buy a Ford vehicle. It's obvious why this is different than anyone being able to buy third party brake pads for your Toyota from Autozone, right?<p>> It’s also probably relevant that MS was not selling PCs or their own hardware.<p>This is the thing that unambiguously should never be relevant. It can't be a real thing that you can avoid being a monopoly by owning <i>more</i> of the supply chain. It's like saying that Microsoft could have avoided being a monopoly by buying Intel and AMD, or buying one of them and then exterminating the other by refusing to put Windows on it. That's a preposterous perverse incentive.
Yes. If you define the market in a ridiculous manner and convince a court to go along with it, anybody can be a monopoly.<p>But the M series are an Apple product line designed by Apple with a ARM license and produced on contract by TSMC for use in other Apple products.<p>Don’t assume the facts from another case automatically apply in other cases.<p>Or as Justice Jackson once put it: “Other cases presenting different allegations and different records may lead to different conclusions”
I don't think any of what you're describing are legal "monopolies". I don't have a single Apple product in my life but I'm fairly sure there's nothing I'm prevented from doing because of that.
And back in the "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6" ruling's days, I did not use Windows or Internet Explorer, and I was not prevented from doing anything because of that. Netscape Navigator on Linux worked fine. Sure, I occasionally hit sites that were broken and only worked in IE, but I also right now frequently hit apps that are "macOS only" (like when Claude Cowork released, or a ton of other YC company's apps).<p>Microsoft was found guilty, so clearly the bar is not what you're trying to claim.
Microsoft was found guilty of using their market power to do product bundling, which is illegal. The fact that they had dominance in the market is not what they got popped for, nor is it illegal.
Let me know how I can unbundle Safari from macOS or iOS.<p>Go ahead, I'll wait.
It's possible on the Mac, but it's not easy. Apple uses an immutable system volume on macOS, so you can't just delete the Safari app like you would a user-installed app. To actually delete Safari you need to disable System Integrity Protection and reboot.<p>There are plenty of Linux distributions that use immutable root volumes. They protect the user in a huge number of ways by preventing the system from getting hosed (either by accident or by malicious unauthorized users / malware). Apple made the decision to do this for their users, and it has prevented a HUGE amount of tech support calls, as well as led to millions of happy users with trouble-free computers.<p>It also hasn't stopped users from installing Chrome and/or Firefox on their Macs, and millions of ordinary users have.
You just described Apple.
Apple has not, to my knowledge, required OEMs to bundle Safari with macOS alongside threats to withhold macOS if they don’t comply expressly to put Firefox out of business.<p>But hey, maybe some weird shit happened during the clone years that I’m not privy to.
Yes, but that was coupled with other factors like them strongarming vendors, already being hugely dominant on desktops and abusing that position et al. I don't see this as being the same. Maybe my bar here is wrong, but it doesn't change whether they are a monopoly or not.
The issue was never "Microsoft has a monopoly on IE6". That's obviously nonsense.<p>The monopoly that Microsoft held was the home computer operating system market, first through DOS, then later through Windows. Holding a monopoly like that isn't illegal unto itself. What they were actually found guilty of was unfairly leveraging their monopoly on the OS market to gain the upper hand in a different market (the browser market). The subsequent range of issues we had with IE6 (compatibility, security, etc) was a result of Microsoft <i>succeeding</i> in achieving a monopoly on the browser market through illicit means.<p>Likewise, "Apple has a monopoly on the App Store" is just the same amount of nonsense. What you could argue is that Apple has a monopoly on the home computer market, or the mobile phone market, and that the way they integrate the App Store should be considered illegal leveraging of that monopoly, but that argument simply doesn't hold water — Microsoft's monopoly on the OS market at the time was pretty much incontrovertible, you simply couldn't walk into a shop and buy a computer running something else (except maybe a Mac at a more specialised place). Today, just about any shop you walk into that sells computers will probably have devices for sale running three different OSes (macOS, Windows, ChromeOS). Any phone place will have iPhones and Android devices, and probably a few more niche options. Actual market share percentage is nowhere near the high 90s that Microsoft saw in its heyday. At most, Apple is the biggest individual competitor in the market, but I don't think it hold an outright majority in any specific product class.<p>Mind you, I think that there is a good argument to be made that the Apple/Google duopoly on mobile devices does deserve scrutiny, but that's a very different kettle of fish.
You were not prevented from doing anything, but that doesn’t mean others weren’t. For example, OEMs were not allowed to offer any other preinstalled OS as a default option. That effectively killed Be and I’m sure hindered RedHat.
That’s not how monopoly definitions work. That makes about as much sense as saying Nintendo has a monopoly on Nintendo consoles or Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs
> <i>Apple has a monopoly over the "M-chip" personal computer market. They have a monopoly over the iOS market with the app store</i><p>When a company is deemed an illegal monopoly, the DoJ basically becomes part of management. Antitrust settlements focus on germane elements, <i>e.g.</i> spin offs. But they also frequently include random terms of political convenience.<p>I don’t think we want a precedent where companies having a product means they have an automatic monopoly on said product.
More to the point: having a monopoly isn't de facto illegal (just look up natural monopolies), it's using the monopoly power in an anti-competitive way that's illegal. Microsoft wasn't charged with having a monopoly, they were charged because they used that monopoly to exclude Netscape Navigator and force bundling of IE.
Reductionism is so cringe.<p>Intel sold chips to anyone. Anyone could make Intel computers.<p>Apple does not sell chips to anyone. Nobody else can make m-series computers.<p>Your argument is basically that Ford has a monopoly on selling mustangs because standard oil had a monopoly on selling oil.
It isn't just about monopoly or unfair competition. This can also be covered under consumer rights - the Right to Repair. No OS provider should be allowed to dictate what software you can or not run on your own device and / or OS you have paid for.
> It isn't just about monopoly or unfair competition. This can also be covered under consumer rights - the Right to Repair.<p>If we have a right to repair (we broadly do not, AFAICT), then that doesn't necessarily mean that we have a right to modify and/or add new functionality.<p>When I repair a widget that has become broken, I merely return it to its previous non-broken state. I might also decide to upgrade it in some capacity as part of this repair process, but the act of repairing doesn't imply upgrades. At all.<p>> No OS provider should be allowed to dictate what software you can or not run on your own device and / or OS you have paid for.<p>I agree completely, but here we are anyway. We've been here for quite some time.
Courts have already ruled it does in the iOS app store market. You can disagree of course but then you'd be disagreeing with legal experts who know more about anti-trust law than you do.
But Apple’s share of the desktop/laptop market is very different than their share of the mobile one.
Credentialism to prevent discussion of political and government entities is incredibly dangerous
The same way Google evaded regulatory scrutiny for refusing to allow a YouTube client for Windows Phone?
Isn't all you have to do disable SIP?
Yeah I'm pretty sure Nvidia just doesn't care to make Mac drivers. For years there was no SIP, Apple sold the Mac Pro which could take Nvidia GPUs, but you basically couldn't use Nvidia because of how bad and outdated the drivers were. I <i>had</i> a GTX 650 in my Mac Pro for a while, it was borderline unusable.
As more people carry ARM laptops and keep the GPU somewhere else, I think the interesting UX question becomes whether the GPU can "follow" the local workflow instead of forcing the whole workflow to move to the GPU host. That's the problem we've been looking at with GPUGo / TensorFusion: local-first dev flow, remote GPU access when needed. Curious whether people here mostly want true attached-eGPU semantics, or just the lowest-friction way to access remote compute from a Mac without turning everything into a remote desktop / VM workflow.
Such a shame both companies are big on vanity to make great things happen. Imagine where you could run Mac hardware with nvidia on linux. It's all there, and closed walls are what's not allowing it to happen. That's what we as customers lose when we forego control of what we purchase to those that sold us the goods.
I followed the instructions link and read the scripts...although the TinyGPU app is not in source form on GitHub, this looks to me like the GPU is passed into the Linux VM underneath to use the real driver and then somehow passed back <i>out</i> to the Mac (which might be what the TinyGrad team actually got approved).<p>Or I could have totally misunderstood the role of Docker in this.
<a href="https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/</a> are their docs, and <a href="https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/tree/4d36366717aa9f17356379296e36b4e690cdd8c7/extra/usbgpu/tbgpu/installer/TinyGPUDriverExtension" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad/tree/4d36366717aa9f1735...</a> is the actual (user space) driver.<p>My read of everything is that they are using Docker for NVIDIA GPUs for the sake of "how do you compile code to target the GPU"; for AMD they're just compiling their own LLVM with the appropriate target on macOS.
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Interesting, but cannot run CUDA or more to the point `nvidia-smi`.
Well, to be fair, the whole shebang is from a completely different company, that have their own ML library and such, so that isn't that surprising. Although I agree that some CUDA shim or similar would be a lot more interesting, still getting to the place of running inference and training with your very own library is pretty dope already.
Woah, this is exciting. I'm traveling but I have a 5090 lying around at home. I'm eager to give it a go. Docs are here: <a href="https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.tinygrad.org/tinygpu/</a><p>I hope it'll work on an M4 Mac Mini. Does anyone know what hardware to get? You'll need a full ATX PSU to supply power, right? And then tinygrad can do LLM inference on it?
You can buy a cheap GPU enclosure for about 100$ off ali express.<p>Takes a standard PSU. However, Mac Minis don't have occulink. So you might be a bit limited by whatever USB C can do.<p>Now if Intel can get there Arc drivers in order we'll see some real budget fun.<p><a href="https://www.newegg.com/intel-arc-pro-b70-32gb-graphics-card/p/N82E16814883008?item=N82E16814883008" rel="nofollow">https://www.newegg.com/intel-arc-pro-b70-32gb-graphics-card/...</a><p>32 GB of VRAM for 1000$. Plus a 500$ Mac Mini.
Those $100 ones don't come with a cage. If you do want a cage, you'll end up with $180 in total, with zero warranty.<p>Article mentions: "Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and NVIDIA"<p>Does not mention Intel (GPUs). Select AMD GPUs work on macOS, but...<p>Macs (both Intel and ARM) support TB, but eGPU only work on Intel Macs, and basically only with AMD.<p>Good news is for medium end gaming choices are solid, and CUDA works on AMD these days.
Fortune favors the bold my friend.<p>I own one of these, the cage is just a piece of plastic. Anyway, I don't think 80$ is that big of a difference here. I can't really afford a 4k Nvidia GPU. Intel is my only hope.
Almost twice the price and simply more accurate info regarding price and features.<p>Brand is TH3P4G3. Egpu.io has decent eGPU comparisons.<p>I wouldn't want all that dust in my GPU fans, prefer that near my case fans. I also don't like it given I got cats and want to store/box hw. I do use the eGPU in the fuse box. If I had a larger house, I'd use a server rack.<p>I was recently in the market for an eGPU but for a different niche (not eGPU/eNPU/eTPU but getting a HBA via TB to connect a LTO-6 drive via SAS). I went for a Sonnet instead, very low profile and small. I also bought an Asus one. Slightly bigger, came with more fans but TB4 instead of TB3 on the Sonnet. The cages are aluminium. Those eGPU were second hand (also without warranty but quicker S&H than Chinese New Year) but came with PSU. As you also gotta buy a PSU for it which came with the eGPUs I mentioned. For me no biggie, as I got a decent PSU lying around.
I've been using a Sonnet eGPU box with Nvidia GPUs (1070/3070) on an Intel NUC for about 5 years, and it works great.<p>One nice thing about the Sonnet eGPU boxes is that they use standard SFX PSUs that are inexpensive to replace if they fail.<p>For LTO, I'm cheap, and iSCSI over a dedicated 2.5 Gbps Ethernet link is fast enough for my aging FC LTO-5 drives and spinning rust backup disks.
I used Sonnet egpu box on a similarly equipped Dell XPS and it had so many little issues that it sold me off of eGPUs over Thunderbolt entirely.<p>Sleep broke across all OSs, if sleep didn't break the GPU wouldn't get powered on with the laptop. If one side lost power during an outage (the gpu side, the laptop has a battery..) it would require an elaborate voodoo ritual of cycling both of them on and off until they 'caught' each other. It would cause the rest of the USB ports on the laptop to reset and drop comms with peripherals once or twice a week, necessitating a rain-dance restart.<p>when Oculink first started showing up I gave up all together and just said "fuck it i'll try it again in a few years.".<p>It worked fine when it worked fine, but the patches in between were not worth my time.<p>I blame Dell and their thunderbolt controllers <i>entirely</i> for the issue, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I would have a really tough time buying the newest Sonnet box to try it out. Now I have a desktop machine and don't fall into that market.<p>I ended up throwing that card (an rtx 3xxx) into a dell rackmount and have been happy with that card ever since.<p>to your point though: the non proprietary PSU <i>was</i> a nice feature, but in reality the expansion card for PCI->Thunderbolt or whichever interface you're using can be bought on alibaba for like 20-30 bucks and the PSU is worth another 30-40 bucks , a generic white-label 650w. I think if I did it over i'd just do that and make an enclosure, but the Sonnet boxes aren't too bad a value by the numbers.
Maybe I’m lacking imagination. But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute? The interconnect isn’t powerful enough to change layers on the GPU rapidly, I guess?
> But how will a GPU with small-ish but fast VRAM and great compute, augment a Mac with large but slow VRAM and weak compute?<p>It would work just like a discrete GPU when doing CPU+GPU inference: you'd run a few shared layers on the discrete GPU and place the rest in unified memory. You'd want to minimize CPU/GPU transfers even more than usual, since a Thunderbolt connection only gives you equivalent throughput to PCIe 4.0 x4.
My Mini is actually the smallest model so it actually has "small but slow VRAM" (haha!) so the reason I want the GPU for are the smaller Gemmas or Qwens. Realistically, I'll probably run on an RTX 6000 Pro but this might be fun for home.
We've seen many recent projects to stream models direct from SSD to a discrete GPU's limited VRAM on PCs.<p>How big a bottleneck is Thunderbolt 5 compared to an SSD? Is the 120 Gbps mode only available when linked to a monitor?
“Lying around”. I’ve got an unopened 5090 in a box that I know will suffer the same fate, so I’m sending it back. So privileged to have the money to impulse buy a 5090 and yet no time to actually do anything with it.
Pretty misleading. This driver is only for compute not graphics.
As a sizable share of the market is going to want to use this for local LLMs, I do not think this is that misleading.
GPUs can do graphics too?
Graphics was not what came to mind when I saw the headline.
Graphics is typically what comes to my mind when people talk about graphics processing units
The term eGPU gives it away, but is inaccurate.<p>Something like eNPU or eTPU seems more appropriate here.
If you could get Nvidia driver support on Mac’s I bet Apple would have sold more MacPro’s.
If unfamiliar: it is a <i>big deal</i> that AAPL & NVDA again have an official relationship.<p>For well over the previous decade Apple has not allowed newer nVidia GPUs (by not allowing drivers).<p>A seven year old GPU (e.g. VEGA64, RTX1080Ti) can still process more tokens/second than most Apple Silicon (particularly the lower-ends).<p>As discussed elsewhere, Apple MAX/Ultra processors are best-suited for huge models (but are not as fast as e.g. RTX5090).
I'm writing scientific software that has components (molecular dynamics) that are much faster on GPU. I'm using CUDA only, as it's the eaisiest to code for. I'd assumed this meant no-go on ARM Macs. Does this news make that false?
My main thought is would this allow me to speed up prompt process for large MoE models? That is the real bottleneck for m3ultra. The tokens per second is pretty good.
Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden? Atleast they should support major device categories with official drivers.
Doesn't Apple support the major <i>standard</i> device categories: NVMe, XHCI, AHCI, and such, like most operating systems do? The challenges are all for hardware that needs a vendor-specific driver instead of conforming to a standard driver interface (which doesn't always exist). Lots of those can be supported with userspace drivers, which <i>can</i> be supplied by third parties instead of needing to be written by Apple.
> Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden?<p>For the same reason that Microsoft requires Windows driver signing?<p>Drivers run with root permissions.
> Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden?<p>Isn't that the whole point of the walled garden, that they approve things? How could they aim and realize a walled garden without making things like that have to pass through them?
Macs and PCs are fundamentally different. Their architectures have always been distinct though the Intel Mac era has somewhat blurred the line.<p>Modern Mac is Macintosh descendants and by contrast PC is IBM PC descendants (their real name is technically PC-clone but because IBM PC don’t exist anymore the clone part have been scrapped).<p>And with Apple silicon Mac the two is again very different, for example Mac don’t use NVMe, they use just nand (their controller part is integrated in the SoC) and they don’t use UEFI or BIOS, but a combination of Boot ROM, LLB and iBoot
> Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden?<p>Because third party drivers usually are utter dogshit. That's how Apple managed to get double the battery life time even in the Intel era over comparable Windows based offerings.
Can I do prefill on the eGPU and the decode on the Mac?
What are the limitations of USB4/Thunderbolt compared with a regular PCIe slot?
Well, for starters, PCIe 5.0 x16 would do something like about 60 GB/s each way, while Thunderbolt 4 does 4 GB/s each way, TB 5 does 8 GB/s each way. If you don't actually hit the bandwidth limits, it obviously matters less. Whether you'd notice a large difference would depends heavily on the type of workload.
I can speak to my own experience, YMMV<p>I hooked up a Radeon RX 9060 XT to my Feodra KDE laptop (Yoga Pro 7 14ASP9) using a Razer Core X Chroma (40Gbps), and the performance when using the eGPU was very similar to using the Radeon 880M built into the laptop's Ryzen 9 365 APU.<p>So at least with my setup, performance is not great at all.<p>On paper, TB4 is capable of pushing 5GB/s, which is somewhere between 4x and 8x of PCIe 3.0, while a 16x PCIe 4.0 link can do ~31.5GB/s.<p>For numbers about all PCIe generations and lane counts, see the "History and revisions" section here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express</a><p>Edit to add: the performance I measured is in gaming workloads, not compute
For gaming, lots of things can affect Thunderbolt eGPU performance.<p>First, you need to connect the display directly to the eGPU rather than to the laptop.<p>Second, you need to make sure you have enough VRAM to minimize texture streaming during gameplay.<p>Third, you'll typically see better performance in terms of higher settings/resolutions vs higher framerates at lower settings/resolutions.<p>Fourth, depending on your system, you may be bottlenecked by other peripherals sharing PCH lanes with the Thunderbolt connection.<p>Finally, depending on the Thunderbolt version, PCIe bandwidth can be significantly lower than the advertised bandwidth of the Thunderbolt link. For example, while Thunderbolt 3 advertises 40 Gbps, and typically connects via x4 PCIe 3.0 (~32 Gbps), for whatever reason it imposes a 22 Gbps cap on PCIe data over the Thunderbolt link.<p>Even taking all this into account, you'll still see a significant performance drop on a current-gen GPU when running over Thunderbolt, though I'd still expect a useful performance improvement over integrated graphics in most cases (though not necessarily worth the cost of the eGPU enclosure vs just buying a cheap used minitower PC on eBay and gaming on that instead of a laptop).
It carries pcie, but only at x4. Thunderbolt 4 is pcie gen 3 and Thunderbolt 5 is pcie gen 4.
Apple should update this page for ARM macs, now runs tinygrad on eGPUs: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363</a>
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You only own the hardware if you can use it as advertised even after breaking all ties with the vendor. Otherwise you bought a service not a product.
You aren't restricted at a hardware level.
So you're just replying to the headline, not the actual article. Useful.<p>Apple, <i>just like Microsoft</i>, has a driver signing process because drivers have basically system-wide access to a system. There is no evidence that nvidia has tried to get eGPU drivers signed for years, but now someone did and Apple signed it. So?<p>And you could always, precisely as the article states in the <i>very first paragraph</i>, disable System Integrity Protection if you want to run drivers that aren't signed.
now can they please approve the linux kernel
The opportunity cost of Apple refusing to sign Nvidia's OEM AArch64 drivers is probably reaching the trillion-dollar mark, now that Nvidia and ARM have their own server hardware.