Why Don’t Macs With Apple Silicon Support eGPU?
In the end, they can do without them
The transition from Intel processors to Apple’s own Silicon solution has brought a number of changes. While Apple PCs have seen a great increase in performance and greater power efficiency, we certainly can’t forget the potential negatives. Apple has completely changed the architecture and switched from x86 to ARM, which proved to be the right choice.
The Macs of the last two years have certainly had a lot to offer, and they continue to surprise with their capabilities. But let’s go back to the negatives mentioned. The most widespread shortcoming could be the lack of an option to run (Boot Camp) Windows or its virtualization in its normal form.
This is due to the change in architecture, which makes it impossible to run the standard version of this operating system. In the beginning, another disadvantage was often mentioned. The new Macs with Apple Silicon cannot cope with an attached external graphics card or eGPU. Apple probably blocks these options directly, and there are reasons for this.
eGPU
Before we move on to the main stuff, let’s quickly recap what external graphics cards are and what they’re for. The idea behind them is quite hilarious. For example, it’s supposed to give a laptop enough performance even though it’s a portable laptop that a traditional desktop card wouldn’t fit into.
In this case, the connection is made via the fast Thunderbolt standard. So in practice, it’s quite simple. If you have an older laptop, connect the eGPU to it, and you’re ready to play. Before the first Macs with Apple Silicon, eGPUs were a fairly common companion for Apple laptops.
These were notorious for not offering much performance, especially in the base configurations. That’s why eGPUs were the absolute alpha and omega for some Apple users to get their work done. But something like that is most likely coming to an end.
eGPUs and Apple Silicon
As we mentioned right at the start, with the advent of Macs with Apple Silicon chips, Apple dropped support for external graphics cards. At first glance, however, it’s not entirely clear why this has happened. After all, a modern eGPU could be connected to any device with at least a Thunderbolt 3 connector.
This is what all Macs since 2016 have been able to do. Even so, newer models are no longer so lucky. Therefore, it is not surprising that a rather interesting discussion has opened up among Apple fans as to why the support was withdrawn in the first place. Although on the face of it, the newer Apple computers have no reason not to support eGPUs, in reality, the main problem is the Apple Silicon Series chipset itself.
Moving to a custom solution has closed the ecosystem from Apple even further, and the complete change in architecture underscores this fact all the more. So why has support been withdrawn? Apple likes to brag about the capabilities of its new chips, which often offer breathtaking performance.
The current boast is, for example, the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra chip. It even leaps ahead of some Mac Pro configurations in terms of performance, despite being many times smaller. In a way, you could say that by supporting eGPUs, Apple would partially undermine its claims of dominant performance and admit to some imperfection in its processors.
In any case, this claim should be taken with a grain of salt. This is because it is user speculation that has never been officially confirmed. Anyway, in the end, Apple solved it in its way. The new Macs don’t get along with the eGPU because they don’t have the necessary drivers to work properly. Another limitation is the number of PCIe lines which the eGPU connection can’t do.
These do not exist at all. On the other hand, it is also questionable whether we even need support for external graphics cards anymore. In this regard, we return to the performance of Apple Silicon itself, which in many cases exceeds users' expectations.
Developer perspective
Although the eGPU may be a great solution for some, it can be said in general that most Apple users do not miss the lack of support. Unlucky, however, are the developers who found it an interesting way to add a powerful external graphics card to their Mac.
I have used this solution with a 2017 MacBook Pro, a box from Blackmagic, and an Nvidia Titan V or Nvidia Quadro RTX6000. Yes, I work with all sorts of crazy stuff. I have the opportunity to test most of the hardware before the official release so that we have enough time to add support before users can buy it.
In the subtitle, I stated that it could get by without eGPU. What did I mean? Currently, I have servers all over the world where I have different GPUs installed as needed, it is not a problem to rent even AWS with GPUs, and the moment you need to do some calculations on GPUs/ or you are dealing with for example, real-time video encoding then sooner or later you have to move to the cloud anyway as where your customers will be waiting for you as an on-demand service.
And where else but in the cloud can you best debug your software for these purposes? It’s always handy to have some fallback to run your application locally. In my case, I use the CUDA/OPEN CL similarities in my applications. The moment I’m on another platform, I “just” change the build to a build for another platform and continue developing merrily.
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