Apple yesterday unveiled the first Mac devices with the ARM M1 chipset as the hardware platform. New items (MacBook Air 13, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini) are equipped with Thunderbolt / USB-C ports, but it turned out that not all accessories will be compatible with them.
In particular, the chipset does not support external graphics processors. Therefore, you cannot improve the performance of your Mac by connecting an eGPU over Thunderbolt.
The company does not specify the reason for the lack of eGPU support, so it is unknown whether this is a deliberate decision by Apple or a technical limitation of the chipset. Let me remind you that Apple developed the Thunderbolt interface in conjunction with Intel. And only recently, Intel made it possible to add Thunderbolt 3 support to devices that don’t use Intel processors.
Thus, users of the new Macs with M1 chips will have to rely solely on integrated graphics, currently available in two configurations: 7-core and 8-core. Apple claims that the GPU in the M1 is several times more powerful than the PC’s integrated graphics. But first, you need to wait for the test results to be convinced of this in practice.
Source: 9to5mac