Re:Ask HN: Why did Apple create their half-baked Metal insea...
by darklion on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @09:33AM
(#30778280)
> had already committed to development of Metal before they knew AMD was up to something.
They might have, but it's sort of a moot question. In 2012-2014, Apple was supporting four different graphics processors across their various product lines: Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple A-series chips. Even if AMD had announced Mantle the day before Apple started working on Metal, it would've been a solution that only covered the AMD category, whereas the first version of Metal was capable of running on all of those architectures. [1]
The only alternative to Apple rolling their own would've been Apple working in conjunction with Kronos to develop a next-gen OpenGL. I can't find anything that indicates Apple approached Kronos, so it's hard to say whether Apple decided against it for technical reasons (Apple may have felt it would have been too long a time frame to reach a final form, or the design-by-committee approach would not have resulted in a satisfactory-to-Apple result) or political ones (perhaps there was insufficient appetite for that scope of change until Apple announced it was abandoning OpenGL for Metal).
They might have, but it's sort of a moot question. In 2012-2014, Apple was supporting four different graphics processors across their various product lines: Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Apple A-series chips. Even if AMD had announced Mantle the day before Apple started working on Metal, it would've been a solution that only covered the AMD category, whereas the first version of Metal was capable of running on all of those architectures. [1]
The only alternative to Apple rolling their own would've been Apple working in conjunction with Kronos to develop a next-gen OpenGL. I can't find anything that indicates Apple approached Kronos, so it's hard to say whether Apple decided against it for technical reasons (Apple may have felt it would have been too long a time frame to reach a final form, or the design-by-committee approach would not have resulted in a satisfactory-to-Apple result) or political ones (perhaps there was insufficient appetite for that scope of change until Apple announced it was abandoning OpenGL for Metal).
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)#Supported_GPUs