Apple 4 patents granted: future Mac Pro with Apple Silicon chip can support independent graphics card

CTOnews.com February 17, Apple Mac devices can only use set display for graphics processing after the transition to Apple Silicon. However, according to the newly announced four related patents, Apple is considering adding support for PCIe GPU to the Apple Silicon chip.

For Apple users who plan to buy Mac Pro or have higher requirements for processing performance, they value the performance of stand-alone graphics cards. You can move the GPU over a Thunderbolt connection on the Intel Mac, or add a stand-alone graphics card inside the Mac Pro, but Apple Silicon currently does not have such an extension.

According to the newly disclosed four patents, Apple is already considering this issue. CTOnews.com learned that Apple said in a patent entitled "logical slots of graphics processors mapped to hardware slots": "graphics processing units (GPU) are now widely used in large workloads because of their growing computing needs."

In another patent called "Kickslot Manager Circuitry For Graphics Processors", Apple introduced a way to switch between different GPU. The patent states: "the slot manager circuit can use entries of the tracking slot circuit to specify which applications use which GPU." the slot manager circuit can prefetch the configuration register data of the graphics working set from that location before allocating the shader core resources to the graphics working set.