Announcement: AMD Based Systems and tonymacx86

[Middleman]

Btw, I thought to inform everyone of a new discovery I'd made today by accident. Apparently macOS does support AMD APU's! They have been supported since Catalina 10.15.4 beta 1 according to this article >

AMD Mac Tipped In Code (And Intel Should Be Terrified)

Code from the latest version of the MacOS suggests that future desktop machines from Apple may use AMD processors for future Mac computers. This could…

www.slashgear.com

It seems that Apple added these 5 AMD APUs into Catalina:

• NAVI12_A0
• NAVI21_A0
• PICASSO_A0
• RAVEN2_A0
• RAVEN_A0
• RENOIR_A0
• VANGOGH_A0

I have also made the discovery that my Atari VCS GPU is Picasso/Raven2 and is supported natively up to 4K. I have booted into the system successfully on Catalina this evening with no SSDTs or device-ids added for the IGPU properties.

 

[Methanoid]

Checks date.... NOT April 1 ... OK I'll buy it... but do you get Metal etc APIs enabled?

 

[CaseySJ]

Btw, I thought to inform everyone of a new discovery I'd made today by accident. Apparently macOS does support AMD APU's! They have been supported since Catalina 10.15.4 beta 1 according to this article >

AMD Mac Tipped In Code (And Intel Should Be Terrified)

Code from the latest version of the MacOS suggests that future desktop machines from Apple may use AMD processors for future Mac computers. This could…

www.slashgear.com

It seems that Apple added these 5 AMD APUs into Catalina:

• NAVI12_A0
• NAVI21_A0
• PICASSO_A0
• RAVEN2_A0
• RAVEN_A0
• RENOIR_A0
• VANGOGH_A0

I have also made the discovery that my Atari VCS GPU is Picasso/Raven2 and is supported natively up to 4K. I have booted into the system successfully on Catalina this evening with no SSDTs or device-ids added for the IGPU properties.

Does this mean amd-osx kernel patches may not be needed for these APUs?

The latest models (Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 7 5800G, for example) are Cezanne, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Middleman]

Checks date.... NOT April 1 ... OK I'll buy it... but do you get Metal etc APIs enabled?

Yes they should be. The codes for these GPUs were already added to the Apple Metal Driver for Gfx9 in 10.15.1.

Currently I don't have Metal acceleration on my VCS with the Picasso, but DRM/Youtube certainly works okay as does full 4K resolution.

Does this mean amd-osx kernel patches may not be needed for these APUs?

The latest models (Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 7 5800G, for example) are Cezanne, if I'm not mistaken.

Possibly. I think the supported models may not need some of the kernel patches, especially at the GPU level.

The Cezanne probably still needs it though. But I do know MacbookPro15,3 SMBIOS (Coffee Lake & Coffee Lake 2nd gen) was fitted with a Vega16 or 20 GPU.

 

[Gigamaxx]

Does this mean amd-osx kernel patches may not be needed for these APUs?

The latest models (Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 7 5800G, for example) are Cezanne, if I'm not mistaken.

No the patches are still needed. I don’t believe these mentioned APU references are outside of the AMD graphics kexts. It would also need to be included in CPU power management kexts etc.. to be more likely to happen. The big problem to overcome is memory allocation. Apple only uses Intel IGPUs for DDRx memory functions. The AMD APUs do not have on chip GDDR5 memory like the DGPUs RX 4xx-5xx models and/or HBM2. AMD uses Polaris/LEXA graphics for these but call them Navi.

Spoofing the Radeon kexts to load is possible but the memory allocation does not match and ends in 7mb max along with black screen. I think kernel patches would need to be developed to assign memory to DDR4 and away from the GDDR5 in the Radeon graphics kexts.