ARM v. Intel Macs for Rhino

Rhino Mac Hardware
1

I had a “flood” in my house that wiped out one of my Macs that insurance needs to replace.

Is there any data available yet on ARM v. Intel MAC performance, particularly in regard to Rhino?

Intel systems have notoriously slow memory bus speeds and poor caching. On most systems you can speed up things (e.g. JPEG compression) by using table lookups of repeatedly used values. On Intel, you get no speed improvement doing that because of memory delay and cache. Plus the Intel architecture was designed by guys named Shemp, Mo, Joe, Curly, and Larry.

In theory, having the memory in the CPU would give greater speed. I have yet to see how Apple is implementing that (equivalent to cache or equivalent to a faster memory bus).

Plus, the ARM Macs have small memory (for these days-16GB). Does the increased performance overcome this?

So I was wondering what the state of reality is like right now.

2

welcome to the club… just that my flood came from the top of the ceiling from idiot neighbours who installed a washing machine tap under the roof without windows which bursted the pipe this winter…

did you try the Vip 8 yet? also there is something like testmetal which should enable the new bling machine for apple. there are some topics discussing Rhino on M1 which were updated probably not more than 2-3 weeks ago.

due to the reason you mentioned above which made my computer prone to die sooner or later i got the same insurance ticket for a new computer. but i am also waiting still for an m1x or m2 or whatever or versions with higher ram to launch at least. but in theory the 16 gb are actually pretty sufficient already compared to all the intel crap.

3

But keep in mind that Rhino V7 is compiled for the Intel Macs, and is totally reliant upon the Apple “Rosetta” translation layer to run on the Silicon Macs.

4

which works pretty ok believing recent topics…

5

It does indeed, but my point is if Apple stubs their toe on a Big Sur update, there isn’t anything we can do about it.

6

We were having our roof replaced. The workers left empty cans and bottles up there. When it rained the bottles flowed into the drains and clogged them.

Stupid is as stupid does. That’s going to be a $100,000 lunch probably.

I’m in no rush but I was wondering what people are seeing in performance.

7

i would hope that you at least will try

Rhino 7 for Mac is supported on macOS Big Sur 11.3 on Apple Silicon Macs with M1