After several months of research, has McNeel’s research on Apple silicone made progress? Does rhino plan to join ARM?
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We don’t have one yet. We’ll see what needs to be done to support them.
For now, they are not supported.
If you need a new Mac now, don’t buy one for Rhino.
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look here
I see cinema 4D has announced support, I hope they can succeed and guide more developers to join. Look forward to it together!
I agree that
Hi John,
Generally Appreciate your contributions/feedback on Rhino forums. Thanks
Rhino is excellent software experience, MacOS is excellent software experience. Windows= not so much. Windows is the only downside of using Rhino. This seems like a great opportunity to expand the potential of Rhino on the Mac platform .
This Intel-Apple Silicon transition was announced back at WWDC several months ago. Obviously software development to account for different architecture takes a while - please let us know what we can do to assist the process as this remains a High Priority to me and others.
As we understand this will take a bit of time, perhaps by the time Apple releases an Apple-Silicon iMac or MacPro, McNeel can have a Rhino release ready to go and optimized for it .
IMO It is highly important that Rhino make use of the power in these high-end MacOS machines.
With the super-integrated GPUs, ‘Neural Engine’, etc. would be interesting to see what that can do to supercharge the Rhino experience on Mac, particularly the increases in Graphics performance.
More multithreading in Rhino overall would benefit all Rhino users of Intel chips and Apple chips as well, as both are multi-core and Rhino often seems to just use one core.
Thanks
Nick
Daily Active Rhino User (Win and Mac) ~ 10 yrs
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That’s always the opinion of Mac users. As a Windows user, I could say the same about Mac.
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Ok, this is fine, Rhino is available for Windows as well.
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Hi -
We don’t necessarily disagree with that and are looking into this.
That said, we don’t have a machine with an M1 and don’t know how or even if Rhino will run on it.
As John said, if you need Rhino and a new Mac now, don’t buy one of these.
-wim
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Wim, thanks for response. I do not plan to buy one of these M1 machines.
For now I think I will be OK, I am on intel xeons (win) and intel I9 (mac) .
But interested in the future of the apple silicon desktop machines, if these occur.
And would want to be able to use Rhino on it as we all know Rhino is awesome and can make anything.
I know this will take time, but what I care most about is whether you have a plan to do this. Glad you are interested. My biggest worry is whether I need to choose between Mac and Rhino after two years.
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Are you all sure these things are for 3D work?
Also I noticed that the max ram option available (16GB) has as little ram as my laptops’ GPU ram.
And I don’t even know how much (meaning little) GPU ram these things have. It’s not even listed AFAIK, because probably is not even important for their intended use.
I’d say wait for some real world testing before betting your future on what seems to be mostly excellent typewriters + Photoshop mini laptops.
Maybe they become a good Rhino viewer at some point? …but I want to see how these things deal with a complex Rhino/GH scene.
I do agree that Windows does suck, so does the fillet tool. Same goes for working for a living, and paying taxes. Yet, here we are. I’m putting my ‘Pro’ phone away now and going to my Chonky Dell to get some real work done. Bye.
G
PS: Don’t forget to upgrade to Rhino 7, regardless of what platform they support today. We can’t really ask for new things if we don’t support McNeel’s development.
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The battery life you pointed out has nothing to do with 3D work, right? And this data is more powerful than Intel’s MacBook.
It is only the first generation now and does not represent a mature form.
Obviously, M1 is only suitable for developers to explore work, professional work needs to wait for M2 or M3. But Cinema4D and OCTANE have announced their support for Apple silicone, which is worth looking forward to.
It will be interesting to see in the coming months if Rhino will run on the M1 chip using Rosetta 2 as a stop gap until McNeel decides what their plans are.
It will indeed.
We know we will need to figure this out but we don’t yet know the scope of the project.
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The geekbench results of the Macbook air looking very interesting and in my opinion Geekbench also use Rosetta 2 to translate for the ARM CPUs but they are as fast as the 2019 I9 from the 16" pros. And remember the Macbook Air is a Fanless design.
I am total curios about the ARM performance with Rhino and Rosetta 2 is. I looks like the CPU market gets more interesting the next years.
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Me too.
Philip
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I have a MacBook Pro from end of 2016, with 8GB RAM.
In my use of 3D (Rhino, Blender) and rendering image, I feel fast and comfortable my MacBook Pro.
I download GeekBench and test my Mac quickly.
So, compared to the new M1 tested on this MacBook Air :
- on single core, M1 is x2,2 faster than my machine
- on Multi-Core, M1 is x4,4 faster
So, the new apple M1 are amazing !
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It will be very interesting to see some real world testing with Rhino and these new Macs with Apple Silicone, I wonder if software developers such as McNeel are excited by changes such as this 
, or maybe thinking this could be a train wreck just down the track 🤷:crazy_face:
I expect we are going to see a lot better performance on the ARM chips than the Intel chips. The latter are an abomination of instruction set architecture. IBM set the computer industry back decade using the 8086 over the 68000 for the PeeCee. Apple felt a need to switch to the Intel chip for compatibility. Now that the Mac (and IPhone and IPAD) popularity has soared they have enough power to go back to a clean CPU design.
I would not be surprised if M$ is already working on an ARM version of Windoze in anticipation of other computer vendors following Apple on this change.
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