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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Hardware Chat Room
Thread: Who wants native Mac M1 support? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 31
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 251 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I've been running WCG on a Mac with the M1 chip for a year now and really bummed WCG and its projects still fail to support the M1 architecture and won't even COMMENT on if/when they will support M1.
----------------------------------------Apple released the M1X this week and the M2 will be out in a few months. So...who wants native Apple Silicon support? I certainly do! It will stop gobbling up 90% of my RAM, it will allow me to run all the M1 Cores (allowing me to crunch more WUs at a time), and it will very likely crunch WUs 20% or more faster. I am running the MCM project. Reply here with your petition and Projects you run. Thanks.  [Edit 1 times, last edit by ericinboston at Oct 20, 2021 11:09:45 PM] |
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Would consider using my new mini IF native support was made.
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Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Who wants native Mac M1 support? Maybe you're going at it the wrong way. Express what in your post to Apple. They have the people that know the M1 better than anyone. |
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jmenard
Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 18, 2020 Post Count: 9 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I currently run 3 MAC's, one of which is an M1 MacBook Air. I will be replacing my large intel based iMac and older MAC Mini at some point with an M1 or M1X and won't be able to leverage the GPU since Apple Silicon is not currently supported for GPU processing. Not to mention the limitations on the CPU processing already mentioned. That will be a serious bummer.
----------------------------------------Like you stated at the beginning I wish someone on this project would at least acknowledge the need for native support on Apple Silicon. I realize the majority of systems on this project run Linux, Windows or Intel based MACs, but Apple Silicon based Mac's will become a significant player as these monstrously powerful machines continue to roll out. I am also aware of the limited funding for development but at least sharing a roadmap of future plans would be appreciated. I also wonder whether the new operators of this project have thought about contacting Apple for possible support especially considering their interest in health related matters. I realize dealing with Apple at a business level can be a challenge but with their deep pockets i would think worth pursuit.
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BobbyB
Veteran Cruncher Canada Joined: Apr 25, 2020 Post Count: 603 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Are there any projects using this BOINC client which support the the M1 chip? If there is, maybe someone there can be helpful to WCG for getting that support. It's just an idea.
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Falconet
Master Cruncher Portugal Joined: Mar 9, 2009 Post Count: 3295 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Are there any projects using this BOINC client which support the the M1 chip? If there is, maybe someone there can be helpful to WCG for getting that support. It's just an idea. Einstein@home has a native M1 CPU app for FGRP5. No GPU apps and per an Einstein@home admin post there won't be one any time soon since the M1 user base is small and Apple decided to drop the already limited OpenCL support in favour of their Metal API. See: https://einsteinathome.org/pt-pt/content/mac-m1-apps#comment-187999 AMD Ryzen 5 1600AF 6C/12T 3.2 GHz - 85W AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 4C/8T 2.0 GHz - 28W AMD Ryzen 7 7730U 8C/16T 3.0 GHz [Edit 1 times, last edit by Falconet at Oct 23, 2021 9:24:48 AM] |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I am also aware of the limited funding for development but at least sharing a roadmap of future plans would be appreciated. Maybe because of limited funding, there is no roadmap.  |
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KerSamson
Master Cruncher Switzerland Joined: Jan 29, 2007 Post Count: 1671 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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As usual, you complain against WCG but the scientists are the "persons in charge".
----------------------------------------The scientists shall port their project to M1 chip. If they don't do it, WCG remains powerless. The next question will be: are the tools used by the scientists already natively available for M1? e.g. autodock Implementing and supporting an additional CPU architecture and OS environment represents a significant work. The biggest problem on the side of the scientists is caused by the limited human resources. Today some members complain about the missing support for M1. Yesterday it was because of the missing support for PowerPC. Recurrently it is because of the limited support for ARM based on Linux (since 15 months, we have at least OPN1 which is supported for RaspiOS). I can understand the member frustration. However you have to understand that a disruption in a computing environment like introducing a new CPU architecture causes a lot of disagreements which cannot be solved within few months. Cheers, Yves |
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nyanthiss
Cruncher Joined: Nov 23, 2012 Post Count: 15 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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IMO it ultimately comes down to two things: 1) device market share 2) limited resources for development (this is different for each project).
----------------------------------------As for M1 chip, it's very nice, like many other from Apple. But to say that it changes anything (because it's "monstrously powerful") is incorrect. Apple has had a fairly small share of the phone & laptop/desktop market for ages, and they are perfectly happy with it. They are not interesting in selling a lot of hardware to everyone, they are interested in selling some hardware with extreme profits to a small part of the market. For people developing WCG apps, market share is far more important than how fast is some specific hardware. And Apple throwing out OpenCL support just makes things worse for developers. If you're an Apple customer, write to them and ask them to reintroduce it, or introduce Vulkan. They could easily support both, they just choose not to, and the only reason is vendor lock-in. So maybe first step should be that Apple stops making things worse. Personally i'd love to see more support for ARM / ARM64 on Linux, but then again i realize for every Raspberry pi, there are 100 iPhones and 10000 Android phones out there.
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