Hi Chuck, you mention hardware innovations but it's largely well-recognized that the deprecation of cross-platform GPU APIs is the main reason the mac is not known for gaming, and has nothing to do with whether or not it has a powerful hardware. It has, in fact, some of the most impressive innovations in recent memory, including unified memory and more.
The Mac Studio is one of the most powerful desktops currently on the market, and its integrated GPU competes quite well against many discrete GPUs. It's your comment and subsequent argument about gaming that is ultimately irrelevant on the topic of whether or not it is "powerful".
btw big fan of walker, texas ranger. Please do more like that one.
Many of the most important ML toolchains run natively on Apple Silicon, including PyTorch [0] and TensorFlow. For example the PyTorch folks have this to say about it [0]:
> Every Apple silicon Mac has a unified memory architecture, providing the GPU with direct access to the full memory store. This makes Mac a great platform for machine learning, enabling users to train larger networks or batch sizes locally. This reduces costs associated with cloud-based development or the need for additional local GPUs. The Unified Memory architecture also reduces data retrieval latency, improving end-to-end performance.
Plenty of other reports out there [1]:
>We ran a sweep of 8 different configurations of our training script and show that the Apple M1 offers impressive performance within reach of much more expensive and less energy efficient accelerators such as the Nvidia V100 for smaller architectures and datasets.
If one is looking for a great bang for the buck and a big savings in energy use, the GPUs in Apple Silicon are a compelling option. Plenty of Apple haters (presumably yourself) like to ignore what has been achieved with this technology, but that doesn't make it any less real.
The Mac Studio is one of the most powerful desktops currently on the market, and its integrated GPU competes quite well against many discrete GPUs. It's your comment and subsequent argument about gaming that is ultimately irrelevant on the topic of whether or not it is "powerful".
btw big fan of walker, texas ranger. Please do more like that one.