External GPU

Hello,

I have been thinking about external GPU's on MacOS High Sierra for a while now.

I have a few questions:-

1) is it only restricted to AMD cards, or are nVidia Cards also supported?

2) Will it work with all AMD cards at least? Because I have found an accelerator card used for deep learning, the AMD Instinct MI25(I would prefer the Tesla v100, but if I can not use nVidia, then this will be the next best alternative.

3) will I be able to use it with Core ML? I ask because I want to use the card on a computer to do facial recognition and object tracking on a reasonably large amount of people simultaneously, in real time, and Core ML along with swift I believe is the best option for me.

4) can I use multiple external GPU's together in a single system, so that I have 2 or more cards connected to one computer?

5) will this also allow me to use the integrated and inbuilt dedicated GPU simultaneously with the external GPU?


Thanks,

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The external GPUs are not a product as much as they are a kit avaliable only to registered developers, enabling them to code for higher end GPUs such as that which will be avaiable in the iMac Pro later this year.


It currently only supports the AMD card it comes with.


CoreML will definitely take advantage of it wherever it currently uses a GPU for its processing.


Apple doesn't prevent you from attaching multiple external GPUs but doing so could yield some poor perfomance since the Thunderbolt bus will need to share so much bandwith with another high bandwidth device.


You can definitely use all GPUs in the system. So you will have access to the integrate, discrete, and external GPU at the same time in Metal by creating a device for each of them In fact there is a sample here which demonstates how you can best developer for multiple GPUs and handle cases where the GPU driving the display has changed.

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