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: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.