Apple Silicon

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OK, here's the first interesting technical point: Logic Pro is running in Apple Silicon mode, but is running Intel plugins. In Activity Monitor, the process using the most CPU is AUHostingCompatibilityService (Logic Pro). With one instance of Spitfire LABS loaded, it sits at around 33% CPU (of 800% total), and climbs to ~50% with four instances loaded.

So, the idea that everything in your pipeline would have to be Universal before you could run the host in native Apple Silicon mode has turned out to be false, as near as I can tell.
 
Copied from another user
OK, here's the first interesting technical point: Logic Pro is running in Apple Silicon mode, but is running Intel plugins. In Activity Monitor, the process using the most CPU is AUHostingCompatibilityService (Logic Pro). With one instance of Spitfire LABS loaded, it sits at around 33% CPU (of 800% total), and climbs to ~50% with four instances loaded.

So, the idea that everything in your pipeline would have to be Universal before you could run the host in native Apple Silicon mode has turned out to be false, as near as I can tell.

Yes and no. You can't directly load x86 plugins into arm Logic, but like I said above, Logic is a special case since it has a helper app that allows it to load x86 plugins indirectly. Not all plugins will work with it and I wouldn't count on other DAWs having the same kind of helper app.

P.S. Some of you may remember I did the same thing with Trilogy during Apple's PPC->Intel transition, so you could run the PPC version of Trilogy on an Intel mac until it was replaced by Trilian.
 
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I ordered the Macbook Air 2020 M1 yesterday. I'm curious about the new processor.
I'm pretty sure it will not run a lot of programs that I'll need for work, but I still wanted to give it a shot.

This transition period will be difficult, but I see great potential for the next generations of the Apple Silicon chips.
 
I ordered the Macbook Air 2020 M1 yesterday. I'm curious about the new processor.
I'm pretty sure it will not run a lot of programs that I'll need for work, but I still wanted to give it a shot.

This transition period will be difficult, but I see great potential for the next generations of the Apple Silicon chips.
Coming from Mac?
 
I ordered the Macbook Air 2020 M1 yesterday. I'm curious about the new processor.
I'm pretty sure it will not run a lot of programs that I'll need for work, but I still wanted to give it a shot.

There have been remarkably few compatibility problems with Rosetta, so I'd be surprised if you find many things that don't work. Notable exceptions: audio interface drivers and Parallels/VMWare.
 
Got that. Thought he was probably coming from another Apple machine, just confirming. I'm interested in what happens when people switch platforms, and why they do or don't.

I use Windows (Thinkpads) systems at home and a 2015 Macbook Air as an every day carry and for work. It's still an awesome machine and I used it almost everyday for 5 yrs now.
And yes, I was talking about the app updates.

There have been remarkably few compatibility problems with Rosetta, so I'd be surprised if you find many things that don't work. Notable exceptions: audio interface drivers and Parallels/VMWare.

I hope so, but I use some scientific programs that could make some problems.
 
I picked up a MacBook Air M1 over the weekend but haven't really installed much. My evening living room browser, kitchen computer. It is snappy and the instant wake is really nice. Ran youtube videos till it shut off and did a full charge before using it again. Thing never really feels like it gets above room temperature. Sure would be cool if rosetta could run 32bit stuff. Guess I should give AxeEdit a go.
 
I’m sitting in a M1 Mac mini here. 8 gigs RAM. I’ve edited 3 home videos - 5, 8 and 13 mins. The video is a Prores 4K out of a BMPCC 4K. FCP editing includes color wheels, color curves and LUT. light touches only.

the Mac mini kills my previous windows machine which wasall around better specc’ed. The windows machine was a dedicated video editing and music editing machine. I don’t do a lot of recording so the 2 significant apps where resolve and ax8 edit, and some games.
I am not technical enough to be able to explain or quantize the improvement. So my experience is anecdotal at best.
 
My new MacBook Air M1 (7 core GPU model, 16 Gb RAM and 256 Gb SSD) finally came and it's nice.
I totally missed that the 'newer' MacBooks are smaller than my old 2015 Air. Really nice. Battery life seems endless and all the software works so far without any problems. And I just was able to crash the machine twice in 2 days ... that's a good sign.
 
all the software works so far without any problems. And I just was able to crash the machine twice in 2 days ... that's a good sign.

"Works so far" yet also crashes each day and you're still happy. I would want you as a customer!
 
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There's nothing on that page that quantifies M1 memory needs vs. x86. The M1 is a "chiplet" with L3 DRAM soldered to the package. It's only two chips though so the size of the L3 will be limited (probably 512M). That's a lot of L3 but it's not enough for an OS, you still need external RAM.

The question is how much memory does the M1 use vs. competing architectures. Is an ARM big.LITTLE architecture more or less efficient in terms of memory usage. Probably less. RISC machines in general use more memory because they need more instructions to do things (because there are fewer instructions). An x86 uses fewer instructions to do the same things but those instructions use more power. So while ARMs tend to be more power efficient they are less memory efficient.

Furthermore data is architecture agnostic. Audio data is audio data. A different architecture doesn't magically reduce the size of audio data objects.

If you are running large projects, editing big files etc. you're still going to want lots of RAM. If there's only 8GB there's going to be a lot of disk activity. Now it's a SSD so disk access will be fast but cell wear could become an issue.

Would love to hear your thoughts about RISC-V.
 
I finally have some time and fired up my new Mac Mini - so far I haven't done much with it but everything worked great and the box does seem pretty zippy.

One bummer, I had an original Magic Trackpad that I got when they came out. I could not get the f**king battery compartment unscrewed. It's like welded on or something. I'm pretty sure that the batteries in it did some damage.
 
One bummer, I had an original Magic Trackpad that I got when they came out. I could not get the f**king battery compartment unscrewed. It's like welded on or something. I'm pretty sure that the batteries in it did some damage.
I lost a Gen 1 magic keyboard when the batteries corroded and glued the battery door shut. The good news is Gen 2 keyboard and trackpad are better than the Gen 1 stuff for the most part and worth the upgrade.
 
Would love to hear your thoughts about RISC-V.
RISC-V has lower code density than ARM, which handicaps it out of the gate, although not in any kind of a major way. Also, no high performance designs are available for purchase at a reasonable cost, let alone anything that comes close to M1 (which also has a GPU and AI acceleration baked in). I do like their assembly syntax, though. Very readable, especially compared to Intel (ARM assembly is pretty good as well). IMO RISC-V has a reasonable shot at lower level MCU market, which, to be fair, is a very large market in its own right, but it’s doomed for higher end (“application”) CPUs in the foreseeable future, unless some Chinese company bets the farm on it. In the US all the major players are heading to ARM, on device and in cloud.
 
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