I know a lot of dullards online said this wasn’t going to happen because it didn’t happen out of the box. But if you connect an eGPU via TB3 the CPU is able to see and identify it. Which likely means this is a driver/software issue which will be address down the road in future updates. You know, after all the damn bugs are sorted out that are actually important (like Safari 14 now crashing on M1 with some streaming services).
It sort of defeats the whole point of an SoC being that the pipeline to the eGPU is incredibly long.
M1 Macs are fast because everything is integrated so tightly. Once you start breaking that up into discrete units, it loses all benefit of being an SoC and slows down performance.
It’s not that people insist it’s not going to be a thing… it’s that people should insist that it should never be a thing. If Apple doesn’t get ARM to provide the GPU horsepower to meet the needs of high-end production, it will have failed as a whole.
This is why what happens over the course of the next year is so important.
eGPUs are not a savior here, it is a calling card of failure.
The industry tried the eGPU route and… it hasn’t really panned out. In a lot of ways it was like SLI setups where the in-theory concept was fine but actual use-cases turned out to be rather limited. Remember how 5 years ago there was all this hype and excitement over eGPU options for laptops by Razer, Dell, Apple, etc? It didn’t just stagnate and disappear for no reason.
The fact that MacOS recognizes a connected eGPU means nothing more than USB-C device enumeration is working properly.
Apple will likely continue to support eGPU until they fully phase out Intel hardware, and it’s perhaps possible that we’ll see some user hack show up that unlocks it for M1+ as well up to that point. But official support from Apple seems unlikely because their SoC is quite literally meant to provide that solution. No more dealing with Intel design and fabrication problems. No more paying AMD for custom GPU solutions.
As the owner of the Blackmagic eGPU Pro with a MacBook Pro 2018, I firmly agree with your assessment.
When I do it over (in a couple of years when this system is needing replaced), I have no interest in the eGPU route. It seems like a gimmick of the time when we were awed by the bandwidth and external bus capabilities of Thunderbolt 3, and thought it would be amazing to have a full-powered GPU on a lightweight mobile device.
However, like you said, it just hasn’t panned out, and it reminds me of other neato ideas over the years there were technical feats but were in retrospect kinda dumb (dual video cards, dual dial-up modems–yes that was a thing for a hot 5 minutes in the '90s).
I mean, think about it practically. You’re taking a core system component like the GPU and stringing it outside of your machine. This puts your system at all sorts of stability risks, which I’ve personally seen. If your Thunderbolt cable or OS implementation isn’t perfect, you’ll see system crashes frequently, not to mention if your cable gets yanked. (Anecdotally, my system crashes stopped when I switched to a shorter TB cable.)
This left me with a bad taste in my mouth for the clunkiness that is an eGPU. Honestly, if it didn’t cook my system, I’d just run on the internal GPU all the time, regardless of the degraded performance. (Which, I’m well aware, makes me a great candidate for the M1. I’ve been so close over the last couple of weeks to going ahead with a MacBook Air M1 purchase to replace this overheating monster of a laptop, but part of me just wants to stay the course and get a couple more years use out of it.)
For more than 1.5m, you need an active TB cable. That’s why you had system crashes go away when you switched to a shorter cable. It’s the same with high bandwidh HDMI and DisplayPort cables as well. It’s one of the reasons that when I finally get the opportunity to switch to HDMI 2.1 gear, I’m getting fiber optic cables so I can avoid the length and stability issue. FiO gets the job done without signal loss or EMI/RF interference. Not cheap, but almost always hassle free unless you have a pet that loves to chew wires.