OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

I wonder if the new Mac Pro's full PCI Express support resolves any limitations that prevents people from using GPUs over Thunderbolt on existing Apple Silicon hardware (this is apparently a hardware limitation).

Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you should be able to not get the full abilities of the latest Vulkan and full OpenGL 4.6 by putting in a recent AMD card. The open source Radeon drivers should "just work" on ARM as they do in the Talos II POWER-based workstation, if they can be stably initialized that is. Heck, Nvidia publishes a binary Linux aarch64 driver and they sound petty enough with Apple to try to make that work.

You could have Asahi Linux running and delegate any not-yet-supported hardware to the 7 PCIe devices it supports. Would be quite a mighty ARM Linux workstation. Again though - only if Apple has the PCI Express support for it.

@Marcan shared some technical details around their PCI Express implementation recently here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557

It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't bode well for full GPU support :(

There are no GPU drivers anyway. So I’m not sure it matters (Linux or macOS).

Seems designed more to support lots of low/medium bandwidth cards, not a few high bandwidth cards.