Apple Reportedly Developing 5K Retina Thunderbolt Display With Integrated GPU (hothardware.com)

MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: If you head over to Apple's website, the Cupertino outfit will happily sell you a 27-inch Thunderbolt display for $999, at least until its inventory runs out. Word on the web is that it's nearly out of stock and Apple doesn't plan to replenish them. Instead, Apple will launch a new version of its Thunderbolt monitor, one that's been upgraded to a 5K resolution and has a discrete GPU stuffed inside. It's an interesting product actually, if you think about it. Depending on the task, it can take some serious graphics muscle to drive a 5K resolution display. It amounts to over 14.7 million pixels (5120x2880), compared to Apple's current generation Thunderbolt display which runs at 2560x1440, or less than 3.7 million pixels. Apple's thinking is likely that if it integrates a GPU capable of driving a 5K resolution into the display itself, it won't have to worry about trying to balance graphics performance with thin and light designs for its future Mac systems.

Comments

Sounds great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Now give us the 17" retina Macbook Pro.

Some of us do real work and need a portable workstation. not everyone is an internet blogger that can live on a low power paper thin 13" stack of paper.

Planned Obsolescence

[Anonymous Coward]

Integrated GPU just means that you'll be looking to upgrade your 5k monitor in a year or two.
Nope, no thank you apple.

The source is *INSIDE* the monitor

[DrYak]

Thunderbolt isn't only Display Port.
Thunderbolt is also PCIe.

The idea is that to drive a 5k monitor, you need a 5k-capable source.
i.e.: a quite big GPU.

But instead of putting the big discreet CPU inside the laptop and have a regular 5k picture over the display port
(which would have negative impact on battery life, weight and thickness - which doesn't seem to align with Apple's current goals which seem to boil down to "Make a laptop thin enough that you can cut cheese with it")
You put a huge honking GPU inside the screen (say a Nvidia Pascal or AMD Polaris), and have the PCIe link to the laptop.
Thus when you the laptop is connected to the screen, on its PCIe bus, it has access to a big enough GPU, but when you disconnect it, the etra weight and power consumption stays inside the monitor and the marketing department can continue touting the Mac Air being so thin you can almost see-through.

Plus it has the nice advantage to lock you even further into Apple's hardware:
you need to buy Apple's Monitor+GPU combo in order to use it with Apple's Mac Airs.
You won't get 5k out of a regular 5k monitor with vanilla DisplayPort or HDMI inputs.

But this also raises a big security problem:
as the GPU is inside the monitor, the texture uploads happen to RAM located *on the graphic card inside the monitor*.
If the monitor isn't powered down between uses, a hostile could plug the monitor and instead of uploading new texture/windows to it dump its memory content and get a good idea of what was displayed latest.
And remember that nowadays games aren't the only things uploading textures to a GPU. Desktop Composers (including like Apple's Quartz Extreme) do use it to composite the desktop too.

Not really innovative

[Solandri]

Putting the GPU in a separate box sitting between the computer and monitor and connected via a high-bandwidth cable like Thunderbolt, has already been done. This is just that idea, but combining the box and monitor. The only advantages I can think of over a separate GPU box are: You don't need a separate power cable because you can mooch off the monitor's power supply. And you could conceivably bypass any cable speed limits by running a direct channel from the GPU to the monitor (thinking ahead to when resolutions are higher than even Thunderbolt can support).

I can think of a lot of disadvantages though. Can't be repaired/upgraded separately. Destroys the thin profile of modern monitors. Overly complicated purchase choices (thinking ahead to a future when x different monitors and y different GPUs are available, you have to pick from x*y monitor/GPU combos, instead of just picking them separately for x+y choices). Hotspot created by GPU could damage the portion of the monitor it's adjacent to. Fan to cool the GPU is stuck in the monitor, so you can't shove it and the computer into a closet with only KVM cables leading to your desk, for some peace and quiet,

Re:External graphics make sense for laptops

[TheRaven64]

That's what most people do anyway. The only people who upgrade piecemeal are geeks like us and even then most of us don't bother

I'd say that monitors, keyboards, and mice are probably the exceptions to these. That was part of the motivation for the Mac Mini - most people already have the peripherals and so can plug in a computer. Generally, monitors are upgraded less frequently than computers and a faster GPU is one of the main reasons for upgrading the computer, now that CPU speeds have plateaued.