Apple's new Silicone chips for MAYA

#1

What does everyone think about this… https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/22/arm-mac-apple/ specifically for MAYA*

#2

I wouldn’t buy the ARM version for about 2 years after the release. I want others to experiment the initial release, see how things develop first.
Maybe Autodesk will release Maya in time, but then there is Arnold, Renderman and other apps you need.
At this point we all can only speculate. Judging from the past it will be annoying for everybody

#3

It’s Silicon not Silicone (synthetic sealing/caulking foam/casting material/breast implants/kitchen tools etc.)

Long term I think there could be some benefits, as tailored performance gains often offer unparalleled speed advantages for specific tasks, save space, money and time (through efficiency and reliability.)

Apple has already declared that they will be supporting Thunderbolt 4 on Apple Silicon, which means eGPUs (primarily.)

Also, I’m fairly certain that under the banner of Apple Silicon there’s more then a slight possibility that Apple and AMD will create a hybrid workstation processor that eschews much of the archaic x86 code that wastes tons of compute cycles. Since AMD processors have almost always been mostly RISC with a translation layer and some CISC instructions to comply with x86 and Intel CPUs are the other way around Apple and AMD CPU philosophies probably have a decent amount of common ground already.

Apple is directly assisting the Blender Foundation in porting Blender to Apple Silicon. Adobe is already, in word, committed to porting their software to Apple Silicon and AutoDesk is already on Apple Silicon.

I would also wait 2 years to see how how well other software developers pick-up on developing for Apple Silicon and really for Apple to work out the hardware hiccups. Whether Apple hardware is ideal for certain people and/or tasks always depends on which industries chose to develop software that will take advantage of the hardware.

#4

Maxon already have Cinema 4d working well apparently on The Apple Silicon Dev machine. Natively… not thought Rosetta.

Otoy has OctaneX already working on it technically they have It working on an iPad! Redshift too apparently.

The 2 things at play here are:

Rosetta 2 Looks incredibly good. They were running an Heavy x86 game in Rosetta2 Emulations and it was hitting the same fsamerates and some other pro software.

Creating a Cross Binary for Apple Silicon and x86 takes no time at all apparently. I am sure there are issues and optimisations and we’ll have to find out I guess.

#5

Apple will likely ship ARM laptops first, then imacs, then mac pros

Microsoft is shipping Windows to work on ARM as well

The ARM chips aren’t as fast as x86 chips yet, but they’re really power efficient. It’ll be several years before they’re competitive in performance for raw power.

Or maybe that won’t matter much by the time we get more accelerator hardware like the rumored Nvidia auxillary raytrace cards. Either way, an ARM computer for Maya right now would be a paper weight.