Next Mac Pro may feature Apple Silicon, PCI-E GPUs

San Francisco, Feb 20 Tech giant Apple's future Mac Pro will reportedly feature Apple Silicon and PCI-E graphics processing units (GPUs).

One feature that Apple Silicon Macs lack compared to Intel Macs is the option to use to use GPUs in external enclosures across Thunderbolt or internally in a Mac Pro., reports AppleInsider.

The majority of Mac users might not be concerned about it, but for some people, particularly Mac Pro buyers, it is a major problem.

However, now, a set of four recently discovered patent filings seem to indicate that Apple is at least thinking about this problem.

"Given their growing compute capabilities, graphics processing units (GPUs) are now being used extensively for large-scale workloads," the tech giant mentioned in the patent application.

"Application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Metal and OpenCI give software developers an interface to access the compute power of the GPU for their applications," it added.

The iPhone maker also mentioned that "in recent times, software developers have been moving substantial portions of their applications to using the GPU."

The company used the term "kick" to refer to the type of discrete unit of graphics work that a GPU might perform.

It further mentioned that there is a problem getting these kicks to the appropriate GPUs.

What Apple refers to as a "kickslot," which appears to be little more than a PCI-E slot, might be used by a graphics card and can be either internal or external to the computer.

"There could be two or more of these, with macOS switching between them," the report said.