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

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.

External graphics make sense for laptops

[sjbe]

Integrated GPU just means that you'll be looking to upgrade your 5k monitor in a year or two.

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. Most people just buy a whole new system when they buy a new computer. Apple knows this better than anyone. What you are saying isn't silly but the numbers don't lie. Most people just go the simple route and upgrade everything.

Honestly I've wondered for a long time why nobody made an external graphics system - either integrated into a monitor or a separate box or in a docking station. I would be SUPER useful for a laptop or other portable device - maybe even for a tablet. Then you can have your industrial strength graphics at your permanent desk but when you are traveling or doing light duty work and don't need it you don't have to lug the extra hardware and have the attendant power drain. It makes a lot of sense if you have a fast enough interconnect. Apple sells a ton of laptops so external graphics processing actually makes a ton of sense for a certain segment.

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.

Re:External graphics make sense for laptops

[squiggleslash]

A quick look at most electronics stores shows that desktop PCs are usually sold with a keyboard and mouse, but no monitor. I'd be very surprised if the majority of people buying those things insist on buying a new monitor.

Of course, "most" ordinary people don't buy desktop PCs, they buy laptops. They rely on "geeks like us" to set up desktops, and they don't want to do that.

I do agree that it's strange that external graphics isn't a concept that's caught on. That said, Apple may suffer poor timing with the idea - Intel has been moving GPUs onto the processor dye recently AND massively upgrading their power. The HD 530, for example, has about as much power as a mid range Radeon and the only reason you wouldn't necessarily use it for gaming is that games still find the concept of integrated graphics weird (I tried it, GTA IV refused to believe mine had more than 128Mb of video memory. Once told via command line switches that, no, really, it does, it ran smoother than it does on my Radeon...)

Now, I'm not saying today you'd want a 4K monitor to be driven by an integrated GPU. But in five years - 3 generations of CPU/GPU from now - there's a very good chance that you will.

Re:How?

[TheRaven64]

Thunderbolt can, among other things, encapsulate PCIe. You effectively end up with a discrete GPU that has slightly higher latency than the attached one, but all of the rendering is done on the GPU and the final image is output directly to the display. You'll upload textures, geometry, and shaders to the external GPU via Thunderbolt, but you won't be streaming rendered images over the connection.

This isn't a very surprising development. At least one third-party has been providing external GPUs for Macs since shortly after they started shipping with Thunderbolt (you can also buy a simple PCIe enclosure that plugs into Thunderbolt and lets you plug in other cards). Moving the GPU into the display (which, in an Apple monitor, already uses the PCIe parts of Thunderbolt to provide USB, Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, and a camera) is a pretty logical step and one that several people had predicted.

Re:How?

[BasilBrush]

Don't sent pixels.

You're sending the instructions that go into the GPU, not the pixel data that comes out of the GPU. So you're sending polygon vertices and textures and so on. Worst case is video, and then you are sending an mpeg stream, which is a lot less bandwidth than number of pixels times number of frames.

Re:How?

[John Allsup]

If you think about how a blu ray player works, for example, turning the video into raw pixels then sending over HDMI is actually quite stupid. Rather, if your display can decompress h264 in hardware, you can just stream the raw h264. With a few decent royalty free standards things could work so much better, albeit against a number of entrenched proprietary interests (which is why I don't hold my breath).

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,

User replacable cards

[sjbe]

Except for modularity, it would be a worse product.

Maybe but maybe not. That's a bit like arguing that a PC with a discrete graphics card is a worse product than one with integrated graphics. Worse in what way? You have to consider the entire product and the equation isn't just as simple as More Complicated = Worse.

The video card would need to sit on a riser (or be perpendicular to the display).

A discrete card could be mounted into a gap in the board flush with the board for the monitor itself. It wouldn't necessarily have to have a riser though that is possible. Even if it did, is that really a problem? I don't see it as one. If my monitor is 4 inches deep vs 6 inches deep is that really a big concern?

It would be bulkier, physically less robust, harder to cool, harder to manage compatibility, and probably more expensive due to the extra components and cooling.

Probably a bit bulkier but not much and not enough to really matter in most cases. Physical robustness isn't likely to be a challenge unless you plan on moving it a lot which kind of defeats the entire purpose of a device like this. Plus it would be roughly as robust as a desktop PC which is demonstrably fine. Cooling is a concern but a well understood and manageable one. We're not talking bleeding edge water cooling here. It definitely would be more expensive than a regular monitor but that doesn't prevent it from being good value for money.

There is probably a market for a 5K monitor with user-replaceable video card, but I think a fixed GPU makes more sense for almost all of Apple's target market.

I think there is almost no chance it will be a user replaceable GPU. Would be nice but it would be pretty contrary to Apple's standard MO. If Apple can make it catch on however it wouldn't surprise me to see something in the PC enthusiast market for user replaceable cards. Unclear how much of a market there is for that but I could see it happening.

Re:How?

[Megane]

It could be as easy as updated GPU firmware to support a new codec (but not for your GPL Codec of the Week). In the worst case, it's still over a link that is already designed to run a 4K monitor, so unless you had a full 5K source, you could send the raw decoded video and the GPU in the monitor would upscale to full screen resolution.

This isn't some kind of crappy USB3 here, Thunderbolt is set up to be basically a PCI-e x2 or x4 port. The question is, what's it's future? Apple has had some pretty cool technologies that died when the rest of the world finally caught up with a different technology, in particular Firewire. Intel has accepted it, I don't see any other technology leap-frogging it yet, and it is possible that Thunderbolt over USB-C could actually catch on. (which could make the mini-DisplayPort version fall to the curse, ha ha)

I hate this a lot less than cramming the whole computer (something you want to upgrade more often than the screen) into a nice screen like current iMacs. Making a KVM switch for it could be tricky, though.

Too late, already probably false

[Dixie_Flatline]

The news cycle on /. is so slow sometimes. If you follow Apple news, you were hearing about this a few days ago, and YESTERDAY we already heard from Rene Ritchie claiming that this isn't happening.

So don't expect anything. And for those of you already mad at Apple for a product that hasn't been officially announced and is probably imaginary, calm thine tits. At least be mad at Apple for the stuff they ACTUALLY do, not the made up stuff that hasn't happened.