Apple Silicon

[tycruickshank]

After having watched WWDC on Monday and learning that Apple will be transitioning to their own CPU designs will Agisoft be recompiling Metashape to run on the new ARM architecture when it is released? I haven't seen anybody post about Apple's CPU architecture change so I figured I'd create a public topic.

[taran]

I imagine that they will, but the real question is over the - as yet - unknown graphics architecture of future Macs. The developer Mac Minis are essentially iPad Pros which have their own integrated graphics. This does perform well for gaming, but I've not yet seen any evidence that it will also be 'good' for photogrammetry. Will Apple still provide decent dedicated GPUs from AMD? Who knows?

As I'm replacing my old iMac, I did pause for a few days to have a think, but there are too many variables yet, and I'm sure that Agisoft will be scratching their heads too. So I'm just going to get a new tried and tested Intel Mac and watch curiously from the sidelines.

Interesting times ahead for Macs, for sure.

[apw100]

I imagine that they will, but the real question is over the - as yet - unknown graphics architecture of future Macs.

They will still be using AMD GPUs for discreet options, at least for the near term. There are even references to RDNA3 based Navi31 GPUs in the macOS 11 beta drivers.

This is very good news as far as I'm concerned. The lack of NVIDIA hardware support as well as the depreciation of OpenCL has already made life difficult for those of us doing 3D work on the Mac. Had Apple dropped AMD, I'm not sure that anyone other than the major players (Autodesk, Adobe, etc) would bother with Mac versions of their software.

[taran]

Now that Apple has announced new Macs (albeit low-end models) that will use the Apple M1 processor, will Agisoft investigate feasibility to create a version that runs natively on the new platform?

I'm guessing that this will be initially difficult, as the first 3 M1-based Macs do not support eGPUs (and limited to 16GB RAM). But if the CPU performance is as they advertise, it will be an interesting one to watch. Early Geekbench results suggest that the new M1 13" MacBook Pro could be as fast as the current top-end 16" MacBook Pro Intel i9. What nobody seems to know yet is the M1's GPU performance.

Interesting times for Mac users...

[Alexey Pasumansky]

Hello taran,

We are planning to make Metashape version compatible to new Apple M1.

So far it seems that Metashape can be started in emulation mode (Rosetta), but it could affect the processing performance.

[taran]

Thank you Alexey. Good to hear that Agisoft is working on it.

There has been a discussion on Reddit about Metashape performance through Rosetta:

https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/comments/jx2xah/metashape_has_anyone_tried_it_on_an_apple_silicon/

It's certainly useable, even through emulation (and 16GB RAM limit). It will be interesting to see Apple's desktop-class silicon in 2021.