2023-06-23 21:11:15
With the arrival of the Mac Pro 2023, Apple has sounded the death knell for a solution that had nevertheless been put forward when the previous version of the professional tower was released: the famous card Afterburner.
La carte Afterburner (image Apple).
Appeared in 2019, it therefore more or less bows out in 2023. Sold for €2,300, it is indeed officially incompatible with the 2023 Mac Pro. And since the card cannot be used in Thunderbolt according to Apple – which is confirmed by the extension that manages it -, it is confined to a single Mac… which is no longer marketed: the Mac Pro of 2019.
Decoding acceleration
But what was the Afterburner card doing? Only one thing: decoding video. And not just any video: it was designed to decode ProRes and ProRes RAW streams in real time. According to Apple, a card can decode up to six streams in 8K and it is possible to install three of them in a Mac Pro. The 2020 tests showed it, it is effective: it greatly reduces the load on the Xeon processors during decoding, to let them perform other tasks. On the other hand, it has no interest if you work with other compression codecs and does not allow you to speed up the encoding of videos either.
It is clearly the use of the card that justifies its abandonment in 2023: the M2 Ultra chip of the Mac Pro 2023 incorporates a dual decoding engine capable of processing up to twenty-two 8K streams in ProRes RAW, i.e. practically the equivalent of three Afterburner cards. The Apple M1 Max and M2 Max seen in the Mac Studio, they can decode respectively nine and ten according to Apple, more than a dedicated card.
Mac Pro 2023 review: the machine does not make the pro
Could Apple have reprogrammed the card?
One of the interesting points of this card comes from its operation. Indeed, the brand has always left a certain artistic vagueness on the type of chip used: the Press release launch speaks of a ” ASIC programmable ” while other pages indicate this: “ The Afterburner hardware acceleration board relies on a programmable gate array (FPGA), a type of specialized integrated circuit. ».
The board has never been publicly disassembled, but the size of the components indicate that the chip is probably (very) large.
In practice, however, there is a fundamental difference between an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuitwhich is literally a “ application specific integrated circuit ”) and an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array, array of programmable gates). In the first case, the programming is done at the factory and it is immutable, while in the second it is possible to program the chip on the fly to change its role.
If the chip reference is not known, the fact that Apple has never offered updates tends to prove that it is probably a programmable ASIC type chip, which was designed to specific and temporary use. This solution has the drawback of being quite expensive to produce — the Afterburner card is worth €2,300, remember – but avoids having to design a chip upstream, which reduces R&D costs. This is a rare choice, which is only really possible for solutions that sell very little with high added value: from a certain point, it is more financially attractive to create a dedicated chip to reduce costs Manufacturing.
And in the case of the Afterburner card, Apple was precisely in the first case. Given its release date (early 2020), it was surely thought of as a transition solution before the arrival of the first Apple Silicon chips, which would make it instantly obsolete, but it remained attractive for the niche Mac Pro market. despite its high price.
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