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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

(rosenzweig.io)
838 points alsetmusic | 3 comments | 27 Aug 25 01:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Tiberium ◴[27 Aug 25 02:54 UTC] No.45034962[source]▶
Sorry to hijack, but since the topic is related: is the development of Asahi Linux still actively ongoing, or has slowed down a lot? The progress for M1 and M2 was steady and now almost everything is done, but the M3+ work still seems to not have started. And with major contributors leaving the project I'm kind of worried for the future of Asahi (on newer Apple hardware).
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1. zozbot234 ◴[27 Aug 25 03:18 UTC] No.45035109[source]▶
The M3+ GPU is also very different. So while it may be true that the driver development for M1/M2 is now more or less complete as OP says, future work along the same lines will very much be needed.
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2. hanikesn ◴[27 Aug 25 08:20 UTC] No.45036848[source]▶
>The M3+ GPU is also very different.

Any sources for that? I'd be quite surprised if Apple had radically altered the architecture.

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3. ykl ◴[27 Aug 25 09:58 UTC] No.45037475[source]▶
This is a pretty well known thing; the M3/A17 generation GPU was a ground-up redesign that added things like dynamic caching and hardware ray tracing [1] which are highly nontrivial to simply extend an existing architecture to support. Unfortunately I can’t find where I read this, but IIRC at the time M2 came out there were expectations that M2 would have a new GPU architecture with hardware ray tracing but this wound up being delayed to M3 because it took longer than expected to do a ground-up redesign of the GPU.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/