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NCAR / VAPOR

VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers
https://www.vapor.ucar.edu/
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Provide a native build for Apple M1 architecture #3269

Open shaomeng opened 1 year ago

shaomeng commented 1 year ago

The current Apple M1 installer is still targeting the X86 architecture. Relying on Apple's virtualization/instruction translation technology must have a pretty big performance hit. Providing a native build targeting the M1 architecture must bring a pretty significant performance boost.

Note: I don't have concrete numbers on how big the actual performance difference is. It'd be interesting to use an existing software with both X86 and M1 builds to quantify the performance difference.

shaomeng commented 1 year ago

A runtime comparison using a command-line utility SPERR. The same software is compiled on both x86 and Arm64 macbooks, and the runtime is collected on an M1 macbook. Runtime comparison with a series of lossy compression error tolerance levels is in the following graph. It shows that the performance difference is in the 20% to 35% range.

Runtime Comparison on Apple M1 System

The raw numbers are kept in this google sheet.

sgpearse commented 1 year ago

@shaomeng Is CPU based data compression the right metric to be comparing? As @stasj mentioned, our data processing mostly happens on the GPU, which is CPU agnostic.

shaomeng commented 1 year ago

@shaomeng Is CPU based data compression the right metric to be comparing?

Not sure. This is the best data point I have right now.

shaomeng commented 4 months ago

I'm not sure if the current offering of M1 build is native or not. @sgpearse can help clarify, and close the issue if it's already native M1 build.