For anyone reading this now and getting confused -- The Afterburner card uses an FPGA. "Programmable ASIC" is just marketing speak.
> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. [0]
I believe there’s an SDK for it. It may not be publicly available (yet?), but third party codecs are going to be able to take advantage of it.
From what I understand (like a graphics card) the user defined software is loaded on at runtime (like a shader). Theoretically any software like this could be loaded.
It's not really surprising. Developing a macOS SDK for letting developers load their whatever on a PCIe-mounted FPGA is a huge undertaking, only done by those manufacturers of FPGAs (and not for macOS). There really isn't any market justification to build that for what's effectively a glamour product.
Craig Federighi mentioned in one interview (with Gruber I think) that the card can be reprogrammed. IIRC there were hints that they could be user programmable in the future, but of course nothing was neither confirmed nor denied.
I think this is missing in context. ( To me at least ). The card can be reprogrammed by Apple. And Apple could offer additional functions or features with it. I take that as something similar to current Afterburner function as in H.265 / 266 Video Encode or Decoding.
Are you thinking for cryptocurrency? I doubt that the Mac Pro can compete with other mining setups on performance per $. Also, Swift Crypto is for general-purpose cryptography (e.g., for network protocols), and so it is going to be much slower than an implementation scoped and optimized for mining.
Could also be a comment on hardware accelerating the difficult bits of some software. A web server could potentially take advantage from hardware accelerated TLS for example.
Modern CPUs already have dedicated crypto instructions which are pretty fast, without the cost of copying to another device's memory, loading a program, waiting for it to execute, then copying the output back.
More likely audio/video workflows where encoding/decoding within a FPGA could be really useful. Realtime effects is also an interesting opportunity (e.g. similar function to the DSP accelerators on Universal Audio equipment).
> The new Mac Pro debuts Afterburner, featuring a programmable ASIC capable of decoding up to 6.3 billion pixels per second https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...