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No, the cursor just uses an overlay plane, and mobile architectures usually have far more planes (sometimes even an arbitrarily configurable amount), and more flexible hardware compositioning overall than desktop GPUs for efficiency reasons.

EDIT: Also note that there is nothing new with the Neo here, as all Macs since the M1 have used the same chip architecture as the iPhone.

Desktop GPU designs did not focus on tiny efficiency gains, and often only has a primary plane, a single overlay plane (for e.g., a video), and a dedicated cursor plane. Some even have to share a single overlay plane between all connected displays. It's a recent thing for desktop GPUs to get more flexible in this area, in part to improve laptop battery life in the cases where the laptop is almost entirely idle.

(For those unaware, a "plane" here is the entity in the display controller you configure to show a rendered graphics buffer, in a particular location and with particular transforms. You commonly have one plane that just covers the whole screen, and then sometimes put dynamic content on top in other planes so you can avoid having to redraw the main buffer when smaller bits of it change, like a video player or cursor. You could also e.g., scroll by rendering an entire document in advance and then move the plane around to reveal parts of it.)

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> Desktop GPU designs did not focus on tiny efficiency gains

I'm not sure they're all that tiny if you can squeeze out 70% of top end performance for 25% of the power draw :)

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I think the implication is they focussed on the huge efficiency gains, and didn't focus on the small ones?
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