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Apple reports fourth quarter results

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176 points mfiguiere | 9 comments | 30 Oct 25 20:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.237s | source | bottom
1. andy_ppp ◴[30 Oct 25 21:38 UTC] No.45765690[source]▶
Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.
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2. reaperducer ◴[30 Oct 25 21:45 UTC] No.45765761[source]▶
by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.

I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.

replies(1): >>45765986 #
3. fnordpiglet ◴[30 Oct 25 21:58 UTC] No.45765885[source]▶
I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.
replies(1): >>45776562 #
4. larkost ◴[30 Oct 25 22:09 UTC] No.45765986[source]▶
There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.

In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.

replies(1): >>45777469 #
5. kcb ◴[31 Oct 25 20:14 UTC] No.45776211[source]▶
They'll just need to start from scratch on all this. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...

I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.

6. JKCalhoun ◴[31 Oct 25 20:51 UTC] No.45776562[source]▶
"If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple."

Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?

replies(1): >>45778198 #
7. MaysonL ◴[31 Oct 25 22:37 UTC] No.45777469{3}[source]▶
Just last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su...
8. fnordpiglet ◴[01 Nov 25 00:30 UTC] No.45778198{3}[source]▶
I assure you if AMD could sell a story to take even a fraction of Nvidia’s market share they could raise as much capital as they want.
9. pjmlp ◴[02 Nov 25 05:59 UTC] No.45788124[source]▶
Metal has little value for research community.