APPLE METAL GPU CODE
APPLE METAL GPU MAC

For ease of this tutorial MTLResourceStorageModeShared seems very appropriate. Metal has different types of data buffers, that are differently exposed to the GPU andĬPU.

The design of parallel loops works much like CUDA, where the kernel is a single function called with an index.

This allowsįor asynchronous and heterogeneous operations, much like CUDA.

Metal orchestrates computations usings command queues and command buffers.

That means that yourĪpplications and shaders are separately compiled.

Metal dynamically loads your shader library at runtime.

APPLE METAL GPU CODE

In Metal, code that runs on GPUs is called a shader, because historically they were first used to calculate colors in 3D graphics.Īdditionally, we learn a few other things: I never worked in it, but I still found the article helpful to understand MSL concepts.Īmong other things, we get the fun anecdote: Recommend sitting down and reading the text, even if Objective-C is not your cup of tea. The website does give a very good overview on getting kernels to work though. Not the typical dialects used in the lands of Our first stop on the world wide web is Apple’s own calculations on GPU, titled Performing Calculations on a GPU using Metal.Įxactly what we need! Until… you see that the interface to work with Metal isĪvailable in Swift and Objective-C. Performing Calculations on a GPU using Metal I advise installing Xcode through your Mac’s app store. However, we will need the SDK’s that come with Xcode to be able to compile for MacBooks. Here is a sample kernel written in MSL that adds two arrays Kernels (or shaders as they’re called in MSL) to fast code, and use them on heterogeneous MSL promises that we can compile our computational This is cool, because my scientific code is inĬ++, I’m not going near Fortran. Programming language MSL, Metal Shading Language. Luckily for people who jumped on the new M1 chips: you can program rather easily for Some proper fast physics! Introduction to Apple’s Metal Off slow, working out the basics of array operations on the GPU, and hopefully end up at Physics simulations to the GPU, they’ve shown that they are quite capable. AsĪ scientific programmer it is a bit complicated to work on the new Apple M1 Macbooks ĬUDA doesn’t work on these blazing fast chips! It would be cool if we can offload heavy There’s no DDR interface that can feed a top-end workstation card.This story of working with M1 chips is an amalgation of various Apple documentations. The only way to avoid that requirement would be to design a motherboard platform capable of handling the combined heat of a workstation-class CPU + GPU in the same “socket.” This can theoretically be done - modern motherboards can field sockets that handle 250W+ of power draw - but you’re going to need to design an integrated part with a combined HBM2 stack to feed both CPU and memory. The question is, will Apple start building its own discrete add-in cards? It would have to, if it wants to supply top-end graphics performance. So long as we’re talking about an SoC, it makes obvious sense for Apple to field its own silicon.

APPLE METAL GPU MAC

What may happen is this: Apple may launch its own laptop / desktop ARM CPU, with its own Apple silicon, while simultaneously supporting AMD (most-likely) GPUs on higher-end Mac hardware. Just as it takes time to scale up a CPU design, it takes time to scale up a GPU design, too. It’s also not an accident that Intel has taken years to bring a discrete GPU to market, despite the fact that Tiger Lake systems with Xe-class graphics are expected to ship in the very near future.

Even AMD’s Radeon VII, while much smaller, is a 331mm 2 design. The RTX 2080 Ti has a die size of 775mm 2. 122mm 2 doesn’t even get the ball rolling, in terms of a high-end GPU.

Apple metal gpu