[orik]

The current video bios’s have x86 assembly in them making them not compatible. Work would need to be done here first. Historically, GPU’s released for Mac’s have had their own bios anyway (EFI support).

Then Apple will need to include drivers for the card in the OS (AMD drivers in MacOS typically lag 9 months from availability of the card for Windows) or alternatively NVIDA would need to write new drivers that Apple approves of, instead of shipping the same binary blob to all three platforms (the NVIDIA drivers were very buggy on MacOS).

Will Apple and AMD / NVIDIA strike up a partnership to do this? Not sure why they would.

I expect NVIDIA to have ARM friendly GPU’s on Windows before AMD though, given their interest in the space & SOC’a they make.

It will be interesting to see if in PC / ARM land if standards arise for motherboards, plug and play components, or if we will only ever sell & buy completely integrated systems.

[dogma1138]

GPUs can already run on ARM SBCs with PCIe. Here is an off the shelf Radeon 6700XT running on a RISC V dev board… https://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-scientist-showcases-w...

The VBIOS is only needed for legacy mode to enable things like GPU init for basic text rendering, while it still exists on modern GPUs it’s not commonly used for initialization, on all systems with UEFI the GPU is initialized using GOP (or UGA on EFI) which is ISA independent.

[dathinab]

Thanks for the link.

[tw04]

> The current video bios’s have x86 assembly in them making them not compatible. Work would need to be done here first. Historically, GPU’s released for Mac’s have had their own bios anyway (EFI support).

I’m not sure this is accurate. I’ve definitely popped an nvidia card into a sparc box and had it work. And IBM supports nvidia GPUs in their power systems.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/data-center-gpus/te...

[dathinab]

I don't remember the details but, I believe to remember that:

> > The current video bios’s have x86 assembly in them making them not compatible.

Is somewhat right.

But it's only needed for certain modes and initialization and:

1. Potentially can be sidestepped (depending on GPU bios)

2. The respective code can be interpreted, transpilled or otherwise "made to execute on non-x86 computers".

Sadly I wasn't able to find the details on the fly, and I'm not sure if it's something which was done by your OS or BIOS/UEFI.