Apple Afterburner Card

The Apple Afterburner Card is a graphics processing unit dedicated to the acceleration of encoding and decoding of digital media.

History
The card was first announced on June 3 at the 2019 Worldwide Developers Conference and began shipping on December 10, 2019 as a build-to-order option for the 3rd-generation Mac Pro. It also became available to order as a separate item during that December.

Features
The Afterburner Card uses a customized (FPGA) chip that is capable of handling six simultaneous streams of 8K video or twenty-three streams of 4K video encoded in ProRes RAW at 30 frames-per-second. It is only supported by the 3rd-generation Mac Pro running macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later. It is not supported on PCs running Windows, including Intel Macs with Boot Camp. It also does not work in an external expansion chassis with other Mac or MacBook models.