New "Mac Studio" from Apple

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

FYI- the relaying of your experience is what has made me hold off on a Studio purchase.

It could be that PT and other audio software use and need CISC (complex instruction set chips) to best do their thing. My sense is Apple's ARM chips are a mixed bag- some things snappy and others not as powerful. They have a completely different architecture (RISC).

If it were apples to apples (no pun) the Studio would blow away a 10 year old Mac Pro. For many PT users, the Studio is more than enough. For others, not so.

C

I would make no simple assumptions based on anything being CISC or RISC, these processor families are maybe not so different as you might think, not in ways that really matter. The distinction between RISC and CISC is pretty fuzzy nowadays. And they get more similar if you look at what is actually happening, e.g. micro-instructions being issued inside an x86 vs RISC etc. One discussion of that is here: https://www.extremetech.com/computin...n-x86-arm-cpus. If I was going to punt either way I'd say the Apple Silicon is a lot faster (not just based on it being "RISC", and a lot fo that comes from focused design and Apple being able to control the overall integration and ecosystem) for our needs than previous Intel processors available in Macs and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg there with a lot more software work needing to be done. Exciting times and just incredible progress by Apple.

One obvious difference is Pro Tools and all plugins today are running in Rosetta 2, and that can be magical and just work, but like all translators there will be cases where it will do pathological things, hopefully they are rare cases... and many people's experience seems OK, but I sure would not take that Pro Tools and plugins running under Rosetta 2 will be OK for everybody because it was OK for somebody else. And likewise I would not assume it was bad for somebody because it was bad for something else. Because of Rosetta 2 I expect more variability here with Pro Tools having more dependence on workload and plugins causing problems than normal.

There are just likely to be many opportunities for different things to behave badly, when going through a transition like this. But who knows what? It's going to take hard core developers looking at native ports of stuff over time, maybe there are interactions with efficiency and performance cores that you did not have on x86. Maybe something caused by uniform memory and GPUs. And maybe cases where the Apple silicon instruction set/compiler chain etc does need some tweaking. Who knows, but there will be stuff that needs work. There is always a long-tail with stuff like this. Lots happens quickly, then a long tail to get stuff all optimized, and along the way some things just won't happen or won't happen fast enough... e.g. we'll find plugins that don't' get ported to native or have too many problems and we'll have to give up on them. Plugin vendors who don't have competent in-house development teams (and maybe we can guess some of those?) uh maybe get ready to say goodbye to.

Stuff will take time to optimize with a native port to Apple Silicon and for a time later. And that will take work from Avid, Pace/JUCE, and plugin developers.

Folsk with heavy GPU workloads on the Ultra are seeing it may not scale as well as it can and needs optimization. Another example of just so much changing and optimization being needed. And it's maybe amusing to see reviews of the new Apple gear like where reviewers have to come back and point out the apparent very high GPU utilization they are seeing in tests does not mean the GPU is really working at 100% (always be a bit cautious about relying on what utilization meters tell you). E.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJQyLvLUoWg but be cautious Max Tech has a lot of clickbait.

[Carl Lie]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

For nearly everyone. And I'll be detailing my results soon(ish).

Looking forward to hearing about your experience.

C

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by kings79

I agree. For nearly everyone it will be enough. Pro Tools will be updated soon...

I just got an email and my Studio has shipped. I'll also be detailing my results here and posting my results with all connected devices to my other thread on the topic.

I'm really excited!

Glad to hear it's shipped. How long ago was the order placed?

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Apple did some smarts to Logic Pro that separates plugin address spaces, so there you can run native Logic Pro with a mix of native plugins and x86 plugins.

So then, theoretically, Avid could do the same with ProTools. And to be honest, I don't see how they could avoid this since it would take a VERY long time to get every plugin developer up to Native. Splitting Native and x86 would allow us to implement Native code piece by piece as it becomes available, just like Logic.

I suddenly feel a bit more optimistic. Come on Avid!

[Darryl Ramm]

I tried to explain why that may be a bad idea. Be very careful just "wanting more". I was trying to answer if this is possible or not, most folks are saying it's not possible, and that's likely so close to being correct as I doubt Avid would do this... but I was just trying to be a bit more technically accurate since folks are going to start noticing what Apple did in Logic Pro.

Compared to Apple Avid is a struggling company with so much technical talent lost over the years, and part of it's developers--the outsourced team based Ukraine is unfortunately affected by !@#$% Russia's aggression. I hope Avid does not try to support Intel plugins on a native Pro Tools port.

Any competent plugin developer will be doing native ports, for many of them that native code will be developed on JUCE and lots of stuff (esp. UI) shared across AAX, AU and VST. For some it may be just a recompile, but hopefully lots of QA and some optimization/tweaks. But folks who are competent, supporting products *will* be doing native ports... for multiple DAWs. I'd rather push on laggard developers to do their stuff, or let them be abandoned rather than have Avid jump through hoops, to make stuff more complex, maybe destabilize Pro Tools etc. doing unneeded complex stuff when they will have their hands full and could be spending that time getting the native DAW and plugins running as best as possible on native silicon. And that native plugin support on macOS will likely go away after a while when Apple ends of life Rosetta 2 support. And for somebody who absolutely absolutely needs an Intel plugin in the short term they will be able to run x86 Pro Tools and x86 plugins all within Rosetta 2.

[audiolex1]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I tried to explain why that may be a bad idea. Be very careful just "wanting more". I was trying to answer if this is possible or not, most folks are saying it's not possible, and that's likely so close to being correct as I doubt Avid would do this... but I was just trying to be a bit more technically accurate since folks are going to start noticing what Apple did in Logic Pro.

Compared to Apple Avid is a struggling company with so much technical talent lost over the years, and part of it's developers--the outsourced team based Ukraine is unfortunately affected by !@#$% Russia's aggression. I hope Avid does not try to support Intel plugins on a native Pro Tools port.

Any competent plugin developer will be doing native ports, for many of them that native code will be developed on JUCE and lots of stuff (esp. UI) shared across AAX, AU and VST. For some it may be just a recompile, but hopefully lots of QA and some optimization/tweaks. But folks who are competent, supporting products *will* be doing native ports... for multiple DAWs. I'd rather push on laggard developers to do their stuff, or let them be abandoned rather than have Avid jump through hoops, to make stuff more complex, maybe destabilize Pro Tools etc. doing unneeded complex stuff when they will have their hands full and could be spending that time getting the native DAW and plugins running as best as possible on native silicon. And that native plugin support on macOS will likely go away after a while when Apple ends of life Rosetta 2 support. And for somebody who absolutely absolutely needs an Intel plugin in the short term they will be able to run x86 Pro Tools and x86 plugins all within Rosetta 2.

Maybe time for a sticky of Apple Silicon Native Plugins.?

[thin ice]

With 100s of plugins, is there an easy way to check what is native and which are up to date?

[its2loud]

Originally Posted by thin ice

With 100s of plugins, is there an easy way to check what is native and which are up to date?

This is a pretty comprehensive list

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/app...tibility-guide

[Michael Carnes]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I would make no simple assumptions based on anything being CISC or RISC...

Very good description, Darryl. I was tempted to comment on the architectural issues but you did it for me. I think that lots of people who've judged Apple silicon based on PT's performance will be surprised by how fast their computers suddenly get whenever PT is native. The delay in porting is an inconvenience to us, but a lot worse for Avid's people in Ukraine. They're looking for new homes or perhaps fighting for their lives. I deeply hope they are successful in driving out the Russian invaders. Even so, their losses are overwhelming. It does them, or us, no good to gripe about Avid's tardiness.

I ordered an M1 Max Macbook Pro back in early March. It's still showing as due in 3-10 days from now. I can only hope that happens, but I'll consider myself lucky if it does. This will be a transitional machine for me. I've long used a Macbook for location recording (classical), so this will replace that. I'll use Logic (because it's native) for recording and then throw it into PT in my desktop machine. But it will also give me a chance to test performance under Rosetta. I'll be able to test stuff like the Dolby Atmos renderer, VEPro and various other things in, um, retirement. That will at least give me some sense about what I'll really need when I fully make the jump to Native. My current laptop is a 2018 i9 and the thing sounds like a hovercraft. It takes very little provocation to spin up those fans. So I am quite curious about the relative acoustic level of the new one whenever it arrives. If I learn anything useful I'll post it here.

[kings79]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

Glad to hear it's shipped. How long ago was the order placed?

Wed, 16th March