With all the talk about Windows 10 and iOS, macOS is sometimes left behind. Despite once being the core of Apple’s business, the Mac has shrunk to just being a tiny portion of the company’s income. Along with the new Mac Pro announcement, it appears that is more going on behind the scenes at for Apple GPUs. Along with the Titan Xp launch, Nvidia has also released new drivers for Pascal based GPUs for macOS.
Superficially, this looks pretty normal, Nvidia updating their drivers to support macOS and Pascal. However, the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has no Pascal GPUs in any macOS product. The old Mac Pro could utilize Pascal PCIe graphics cards but the rest of the system won’t hold up. For the MacBook, the GPUs are currently dominated by Intel iGPUs and AMD’s GCN based solutions. This begs the question as to why Nvidia is still working on driver development.
The most likely possibility is that Nvidia is laying the groundwork for future Apple contracts. Doing driver support on their own dime can be a subtle sign to Apple to show they mean business. Another possibility is for external GPU docks which while not officially supported, are gaining popularity. Last of all, there is a growing market of Hackintoshes which use standard PC hardware with macOS. With the stagnation of the Mac Pro, Hackintoshes have grown in popularity. It will be interesting to see what will result from this new development from Nvidia.
Yeah, it’s the external GPU docks IMO. Apple may be having a change of heart towards these. Clearly a market for CUDA devs on Macs, maybe?