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Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: Apple ARM on new Macs...BOINC porting? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 7
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 258 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi all. I've searched for this topic throughout the forum but did not find it:
----------------------------------------Is BOINC planning to be available on Apple's Macs that use their ARM (and future ARM) chips? The first wave of non-Intel Macs are due out in November and I believe all Macs are going to be non-Intel starting 2021. I'm also curious what Intel desktop CPU compares to the Apple A14 on their upcoming Macs for BOINC/WCG processing (I run Mapping Cancer Markers). If the A14 churns out less WUs than a 9th gen i5 chip, I would be unimpressed. Thanks in advance!  |
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Martin Schnellinger
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Apr 29, 2007 Post Count: 123 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hello,
I have no deep knowledge, but as far as I understand, the operating system should be far more important than the chip. So at least in theory (conventional wisdom) there should be no problem if a new chip comes out. It is the operating system (in the case of Apple it is MacOS as far as I know) that decides, what the chip has to do, in other words for what kind of operations the chips power is used for. Personally I have never seen a thread in the forums complaining that a new type of CPU was a problem. All the best in these Corona times Martin |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Even the OS has to conform to the chip's instruction set.. X86 programs won't run on the ARM chips...
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alanb1951
Veteran Cruncher Joined: Jan 20, 2006 Post Count: 953 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Even the OS has to conform to the chip's instruction set.. X86 programs won't run on the ARM chips... That's true if taken literally, and would certainly apply to the Operating System and the standard "userland." However, there are techniques such as emulation and just-in-time translation that can be used to run non-native applications. (Famously, Java!); when Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel, they came up with tools to aid the transition, including Rosetta which enabled the use of PowerPC programs on Intel processors... Part of the transition effort for Intel->ARM is a tool called Rosetta 2 which acts as a run-time translator. A web search on "Apple ARM" found loads of items, such as this one from MacRumors. I don't know how well that would do supporting BOINC and project applications, though! It will obviously be better to actually build application versions using the native instruction set! It'll be interesting to see what happens, because if BOINC projects want to support new Apple machines they'll probably be able to produce applications that can also run on (64-bit) Linux on ARM with little extra effort. Interesting times! Cheers - Al. |
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 258 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Hi all. I'm wondering if anyone has purchased a new M1 Macbook and tried running BOINC/WCG on it. If so, any performance data you can give us compared to other machines you may be running BOINC on?
----------------------------------------Thanks! |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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You may want to check out the topic in Hardware Chat Room about the new Apple M1 chip.
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nickoli
Senior Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 28, 2005 Post Count: 167 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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FYI, the BOINC website shows the latest BOINC version is in Universal 2 binary for both 64-bit Intel and Apple Silicon.
----------------------------------------7.16.12 Recommended version (Universal2: 64-bit Intel and Apple Silicon)  |
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