This might seem a mundane, niche product announcement, but take a minute to read this post from Jeff Benjamin:
The 2016 MacBook Pro has endured criticism for its lack of I/O ports, but what that it does have — two or four Thunderbolt 3 ports based on your configuration — have lots of potential. For example, it’s now possible to connect an external GPU (eGPU) box via Thunderbolt 3 and tap into the power offered by a full-sized graphics card.
Imagine a box that offered the power and expandability of a Mac Pro that plugged into a port (or two) on your MacBook Pro.
You’d have the lightness and portability of a laptop and, arriving at your desk, you’d have a large display and the growling power of large, desktop class expansion cards, limited only by the transfer speeds of Thunderbolt 3. And Thunderbolt 3 is no slouch.
Interesting possibilities there.
Would be really nice if Apple fully supported this in macOS like Windows does. This set up as well as other eGPU boxes works plug n play in boot camp under Windows but is janky as hell under macOS.
This has been available to PC laptops since October 2015, chiefly driven by Razer in particular:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3019369/hardware/the-razer-core-can-boost-any-thunderbolt-3-equipped-laptop-with-an-external-gpu.html
In fact, this frontier has been explored by MacVidCards since last year to allow eGPU options for the existing Mac Pro 6,1 — despite only having Thunderbolt 2:
http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-next-frontier-egpu-for-macs
This type of thing is the future, and Apple is way, way, way behind. But then again, this is a company that refused to recognize SLI setups even when the Mac Pro towers were the de facto norm. There’s a reason BlackMagic still unofficially recommends a Hackintosh and “officially” a cMP 5,1 (due to the ability to run full-size current-gen graphics cards).
Edit: From the 9to5 thread:
“This is comically more convoluted than just spinning up a hackintosh.”
Yep.
Why does it only work in Windows not macOS, even on the same hardware? Is that one of those “drivers” that macOS doesn’t have but Windows does? Will that have to come from the GPU manufacturers or the OS?
Then I guess it’s a good thing that building and maintaining a hackintosh itself is so relatively trivial and not at all time-consuming.
I do think this is where we are heading. Being able to plug a lightweight, minimalist Mac (or potentially an iPad Pro) into a docking station that has all the ports and possibly a GPU makes a ton of sense.
Interesting but it really needs to just plugin and work. Hopefully, this stuff will be better supported in 10.13 if not before as it’s one of the main advantages of the port change
Rube goldberg
well this has been the promise of thunderbolt all along, hasn’t it? i know a few people who do this with thunderbolt 2 (it’s just not as fast) and even edit video professionally on a macbook air. but it seems like a hassle to get it recognized by osx sometimes, and most of the times you have to build it yourself (meaning: getting an enclosure and put the gpu in there). when they announced thunderbolt on the mac, i was hoping for a lot of prebuilt eGPU solutions to appear on the market, but sadly they didn’t materialize.
i think i’ve read somewhere, that eGPU support is built into OSX Sierra finally.
yup, “relatively” trivial. not as trivial as buying a mac but easier than building and maintaining a windows-machine – still a good trade-off, imho.
Do you need to press an “eject” button before disconnecting the cable?
If you accidentally get unplugged, what happens?
afaik, the problems mostly come from apple’s side, but it’s supposed to be better with sierra. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5a6z8s/my_experience_with_the_new_13_mbp_and_the_razer/
basically, you seem to need to patch a kext and run a phyton-script – so it’s not very user-friendly at the moment 🙂
there usually are drivers available for amd or nvidia gpus even if they are not normally used in apple’s hardware (some even work otb) – it’s the “e” in eGPU that seems to be the problems on macs.
good questions. it seems that you have to boot up the system with the eGPU connected, so no ejecting/hotplugging. i guess, if you accidentially unplug the cable while the system is running, you’ll get a nice, fat crash. but this seems to be a matter of software, not hardware.
another post on the – rather sad – reality of eGPUs on macs:
http://www.journaldulapin.com/2016/09/05/the-bait-of-the-egpu-and-the-wolfe-on-kickstarter/
this is more about gaming – if you just use the eGPU for computing (e.g. cuda), it might make more sense.
Enjoy your hobby.
Thanks for the answers. I must confess I didn’t RTFA. Sounds like the concept needs a lot of work to be practical.
I mean frankly, if we’re being upfront about degrees of effort to achieve performance-based metrics, the most trivial solution is to buy a PC and use Windows. Things like updated graphics, eGPU setups, improved aftermarket SSD options, fast RAM, these are all routine items that require considerable hoops-jumping to do on Mac. Right now it is objectively a time-consuming hassle to use Mac OS X in a professional environment.
A Hackintosh is only difficult if you buy non-standard parts — there are plenty of recommended builds that install OS X without a hitch and can follow along with updates from the App Store without issue. Yes, it’s still a hassle, but that’s what we have to resort to when Apple’s idea of high-end computing is a 4 year old trash can, a 2 year old desktop with mobile components, and a laptop that tops out at 16GB of RAM.
“We,” indeed. I’m also amused that you see using Windows as a process that is relatively free of hoop-jumping. Outside of an IT-managed office environment, that is.