Re:All-new iMac features the M1 chip
by paulmd on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @02:33PM
(#26878992)
it's too bad Apple has an irrational vendetta against the company that makes the best hardware video encoders on the market. NVENC is really, really good, at 1080p you need to be running 6-12 dedicated cores (depending on settings) in order to match the quality.
AMD chips would have failed if they had used them too - that was the era of "baking your GPU" due to failed solder bumps and that definitely applied to AMD too, Apple is just such a clientzilla that they demanded payment for an industry-wide problem caused by the switch to RoHS-compliant solders. I think it's much more about control - CUDA is a third-party ecosystem that Apple doesn't want its clients getting dependent on, because then that would constrain apple's choices in hardware. Nobody locks in Apple's clients except Apple.
AMD chips would have failed if they had used them too - that was the era of "baking your GPU" due to failed solder bumps and that definitely applied to AMD too, Apple is just such a clientzilla that they demanded payment for an industry-wide problem caused by the switch to RoHS-compliant solders. I think it's much more about control - CUDA is a third-party ecosystem that Apple doesn't want its clients getting dependent on, because then that would constrain apple's choices in hardware. Nobody locks in Apple's clients except Apple.