M1 Chip for the Mac

Flame Between Renders
1

What do you make of the new M1 chip for the Macs? How will this affect Flame development do you think?

2

This stat is certainly interesting:

M1 MacBook Pro … capable of playing back 8K ProRes video in DaVinci Resolve with zero dropped frames.

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3

I don’t think it has any impact on Flame. They didn’t bother to say anything about Mac Pro’s or Imacs, and if they’re going in the M1 direction for those machines I’m sure our Montreal friends will be on top of it.

I do wish they’d say something about the future of the cheese graters. It’s been a year and there aren’t new chips shipping with it. Same giant price, year-old chips.

4

They are definitely going into Mac Pros. There will be no more intel Macs after next year.

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5

I’m curious to see if the Pro line is going to have multiple M1s or if there’s an M2, etc.

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6

Going by the naming and development conventions of the A series chips, I would guess it would be something like M1X or M1 Pro. I’m curious what their plans for GPUs for pro machines are. They seem pretty proud of their integrated GPUs in these new machine but I would assume they would still include some sort of discreet GPU but who knows. I have a paid Apple developer account so in theory i can order one of the development machines but it’s not a powerful machine. I would see it being hard to develop a resource intensive application like Flame with it. Then again, there already are Cinema 4D and Adobe and Resolve updates so maybe they get better machines than no-name devs like myself.

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7

I remember the PowerPC to Intel transition. It was smooth, but it took a while for the non-Apple Pro apps to be rewritten for native. But it def will happen. I think they said that Adobe was close to Lightroom, but it’s gonna be prob next summer for After Effects, I would guess (or whenever WWDC or AdobeMAX is).

8

I haven’t spent meaningful time in the Adobe suite in a while, but I feel like they never really finished porting it from Mac os9. :stuck_out_tongue:

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9

My main gripe would be that the M1 chips can only address 16GB.

10

Are you sure that they can’t address more than 16GB? I don’t see that stated anywhere. To me, It looks more like they’re just not making them with more than 16GB - presumably because there’s so few people who’d want more than that in these consumer level systems. Either way, not being able to upgrade the memory is a definite strike against these chips.

11

I hope it’s not an inherent limit.

12

I read some blurb that less ram will be required due to its architecture, but that’s probably just usual marketing bs. Also read a rumor that a “mini” mac pro is in the works.

I’ve decided every platform sucks in some way so I’m shopping for a new dual boot Flame Linux/Win box to sit next to my trashcan…when one version pisses me off, I can just switch to another.

13

So, um, according to geekbench, the M1 Macbook AIR performs better than a 2019 mac pro, apparently…

(for multi-core stuff the cheese graters win handily, but still.)

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14

This is a pretty crazy demo of Resolve debayering 4K R3D on a Mac mini in real time. I was dubious as to whether we would see Flame for M1 but now I’m wondering if this is an existential threat to all high-end video software, if being on M1 means getting the same performance as a pro workstation for 1/5th the price.

15

That’s insane!!! IDK…I’m starting to get very excited at the prospect of what an actual M series pro machine might be capable of!!!

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