CUDA 10.2 is the last release to support macOS

Nvidia releases CUDA toolkit version 10.2 on November 20th, 2019 with a bit surprise – it drops macOS support. According to the release notes, 10.2 will be the last version of the toolkit to support mac operating system while the next release will remove the support. Release notes published here says:

cuda-3

Apple and Nvidia have had a hard time getting along since the big failure of 07. MacBook Pros with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT manufactured between May 2007 and September 2008 had a faulty underlying G84 graphics chip that resulted in a huge loss for Apple. Apple offered free repairs and refunds (if you’ve already paid for repair) to the customers for several years since after manufacturing. Apple also recalled all the shelved unit from the market. Although NVIDIA has made significant progress since then with their CUDA architecture and ecosystem; it’s Apple who has learned its lesson for life: “no more NVIDIA

Slowly but surely Apple started drifting away from NVIDIA and inclined more towards AMD. Today you won’t find a singleĀ NVIDIA GPU in Mac offering. Now, while we all think that NVIDIA retaliated by removing support for macOS, it turns out Apple themselves wanted this since long. Apple seems so badly hurt that they don’t want anything to do with NVIDIA even at the expense of customers who love Mac machines and GPU development because let’s all agree; there’s no better platform and ecosystem for GPU development other than CUDA.

The dust will settle down at game/software developers supporting both OpenCL and CUDA while researches and custom software libraries like us pushing for CUDA on windows/linux. The only winner here is AMD who will benefit at the expense of Apple, NVIDIA and developers!

CUVIlib - CUDA Vision & Imaging Library - is a simple to use, GPU accelerated computer vision SDK. The library is available for download for free for personal unlimited use. For more information, visit our website at cuvilib.com.