Status on m1/m2 update?
Comments
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The both of the approaches (longterm backward compatibility x fast HW & SW development) have its advantages and disadvantages....
And it suits different purposses and needs. One can choose in between... And so far, it is just right....
What causes problem is if one wants to have benefits of the both worlds in one box. Some Apple users seem to me like that. But the truth is, one can live only in one of those worlds.... Breaking compatibility means things do not work at all or well for longer or shorter time... That is iron rule and anybody cannot do anything about it... That is how things work....
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@Jeremy_NI points to this topic when he closes redundant ones about AS compatibility.
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THIS^^^
This is precisely the apple ecosystem and culture. They set their own expectations and then demand every 3rd party vendor jump when they snap their fingers, from software to hardware vendors, and this attitude is cultivated and perpetuated by the company itself. You can see this across a variety of VST/music sites, and the impatient comments. If every major tech vendor acted exactly like mac, the world of tech would be much worse, much more separatist. (and some are trying, now....)
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I already said it several times, but again.
Apple reminds me of communist's way of ruling in the way "we know what is the best for you" and "we decide, what the rules are".
I have experienced that quite a lot. And so a bit oversensitive.... No more again, I hope.
But I admit, there are differences. Under communists hardly anything has worked and things were ugly and gray, under Apple thing are nice and shiny and work.
But still....
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A lot of Apple bashing, when actually almost everybody but NI did manage the transition to ARM - often in less than one year.
And without even speaking about Apple Silicon, NI has a long history of not improving/updating/fixing its products. And when they provide an update, it's often a downgrade (like with Battery 4). Most issues I had in my audio computer life were with NI. Recently, I discovered that GR6 was not reporting the latency to the host for exemple (and it's a known issue that will not never be fixed, according to the support). But there's so much stuff they just let like that during ages before fixing (if they ever fix it) : for exemple the GUI of Reaktor and Kontakt...
So I'm a bit amazed that some here are defending NI and attacking Apple, when actually one is providing a quite spectacular innovation (powerful chips that don't heat, at a decent price) while the other is a zombie company since years...
P.S. : by the way, I have a lot of bad thing to say about Apple, and I don't like their constant disruptive strategy when it's just about bringing stupid iphone stuff into Mac OS, but the ARM chip is clearly the best thing they did since years...
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By the way, it's a bit funny to hear Kubrak comparing Apple to "communists deciding for the good of the people", when it's actually the very core of capitalism to control people instead of repressing them (even if in USA, 0.639% of the population is in jail, and it's much more than in China or North Corea)...
Please Kubrak, read something like "Postscrip on the societies of control" by Gilles Deleuze...
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I'm a long-time Mac user (25 years or so) for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is work requirements, non-audio). I know the way they go, and I'm generally fine with their 'keep up with where we're going' mentality where hardware is concerned (though I've never found them particularly competent at softwaring, other than Logic Pro, which I still think of as mostly eMagic code with Mac optimizations and skinning)
I remember the switch from PPC to Intel vividly. During this time, my PPC machine kept working all the way through the dust-settling of a bit over 2 years before I switched over and things have been fine. Same conversations then.
One thing I remember very well is that I dropped a few companies from future purchases if they'd taken too long (by whatever time-frame I used at the time) or if they dropped too much of their software (deprecated it to 'never updating') IF they were still selling it as cross platform. Not out of anger, but out of future-proofing. I have far too many projects across decades that I never quite 'finished' and haven't bounced down, and I need them to at least open and get me close to where I left off. So if too much time had passed, I'd start phasing things over whenever I opened a project and noticed.
I'll admit that I'm a bit worried, for NI as a company, that it's taken so long. I really, really like my NI plugins... I just remember a variety of promises that just seemed to go on forever and then silence.
It doesn't help that there are others in their new collective 'Soundwide' that are companies I no longer view as financially/business healthy/safe-for-the-future... like iZotope: still selling Exponential Audio stuff as current/cross-platform and their instruments (all of them) as current/cross-platform, and yet aren't updating ANY of those to M1 ever. This troubles me for NI, since there are usually business reasons for 'joining' 'collectives' as opposed to standing alone, and not usually good ones. I'd hate to see Massive X pop up on sale for $29 every other week on plugin boutique.
That being said:
I recently intentionally upgraded my desktop from a 2009 Mac Pro running High Sierra to a 2020 iMac 27" (6-core i5) running Big Sur, and lost exactly one plugin (across NI, IK, iZotope, Spectrasonics, AAS, Waves, Arturia, Lennar Digital, u-he, blah)... I count Novation V-Station as a loss because even though it opens and plays in projects, I can't do anything new with it. I'm very happy with that.
I then also had to unintentionally upgrade my laptop, so I decided to go for an M1 Pro MacBook 14. I hate every MacBook between 2016 and 2020 with a passion, so the 14 was perfect, except for that M1 part.
Anyway: I've chosen to keep it 'M1 native apps and plugins only' and have noticed that the benchmarking shows this machine should just SMOKE the i5, despite being a laptop. The multicore performance is supposed to be so much better.
But it doesn't smoke it at all. It's basically the same. Identical projects of 12-15 instruments + a few audio tracks + EFX and a few busses shows pretty much half the per-thread cpu utilization on the iMac (12) as the Macbook's 6 (performance cores).
That's not a complaint. Going from 20% on each of 6 cores to 10% on each of 12 threads is still so good as to be sort of chuckling inducing. Enough so that I've nearly decided to experiment with Rosetta on another boot, if I had the time to do so.
BUT: if NI is just going slow in order to optimize, then I'm good with it. It's fairly clear to me that with my real-use projects, not benchmarks, that either a) the benchmarks are a total lie... all of them (which I don't think would be completely accurate), or b) most if not all of my M1-native plugins are just fix-and-compile, as opposed to 'optimize'... not at all the same thing.
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almost everybody but NI did manage the transition to ARM - often in less than one year.
Name a single third party developer with an application that needs to generate optimised native machine language in close to real time from a bespoke high level language (unsupported by library compiler tech) with no existing ARM based toolchain who has transitioned quicker than NI...
I'm a bit amazed that some here are defending NI and attacking Apple
Really? on an NI product forum?
when actually one is providing a quite spectacular innovation (powerful chips that don't heat, at a decent price)
ARM tech has been mature for some time now, it's nothing ground breaking, just business strategy. Typical of Apple to present existing tech as an innovation though to be fair - they are masters of sales narrative.
We're getting away from the point here though - this isn't about Intel Vs Apple, or bashing Apple, it's about folk blaming NI for a problem that was caused by Apple (that's not a criticism of Apple). Nobody is 'bashing' Apple here. Some Apple users are bashing NI, possibly because they are unable to face the awkward truth that their life has been inconvenienced by Apple's strategy decisions. Cognitive dissonance is real!
I'm not bashing anyone, just trying to point out why it takes longer to transition a technology like Reaktor to a completely new hardware platform. And that if Apple users are angry that this is happening, that's something to take up with Apple. It's totally unreasonable to blame it on NI. Sure it's fine to wish it could happen faster and to ask why it doesn't, but to insist that it should happen faster is somewhat childish - that's the attitude that earns the 'entitled' label
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One other comment on optimization, if I may.
On the M1, my 20% average per core performance is interrupted by periodic bursts on 1-2 of the cores to like 60%.
On the Intel, my averages are as smooth as I've EVER seen on any computer I've ever used. It's astonishingly smooth.
This is very important, since in Logic Pro at least (I use Live also), spiking leads to overloads, and overloads lead to playback stop. Overloads are a buzz kill.
I know nearly 2 years feels like a really, really long time, and it's definitely longer than some others who've 'achieved' M1 native. But I figure in reality, even those guys have another year or slightly longer to get those spikes in order, and Apple probably has some work to do with APIs and such also.
If we go 3 years total, all around, it's still shorter than something else I remember oh so fondly: Vista 64-bit support all around!!! Wee. That was FUN.
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On the M1, my 20% average per core performance is interrupted by periodic bursts on 1-2 of the cores to like 60%.
System on a chip with many subsytems sharing resources.. like ram... I would expect there to be occasional spikes when everything wants the same resources. Just fine for most desktop tasks, but not so good for real time audio processing.
Will probably improve with firmware and OS revisions. Can you tell the OS to prioritise your audio apps? or increase audio latency?
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By the way, it's a bit funny to hear Kubrak comparing Apple to "communists deciding for the good of the people", when it's actually the very core of capitalism to control people instead of repressing them (even if in USA, 0.639% of the population is in jail, and it's much more than in China or North Corea)...
1) Every human society controls people. Maybe there are exceptions, but I do not know any society now or in the past that would not do it.... It is big difference between simple forcing people/customers and giving the choise. (If Apple continued to produce also x86 computers, I would not complain.... On Windows one may choose x86 or ARM...)
2) Yes, US has very high numbers of people in jail. Also high numbers of death penalty. And many other things... Many americans came to my country in 90ties and felt more freedom than home...
In my country, there was no death penalty for last 33 years and jail rate is a bit less than 0.2% (China has a bit more than 0.1%, Russia 0.39%, Finland 0.05%).
I may well compare how it was like under communists and now.... Definitely big change to better. (Some things were better back then. We were younger, and there was not much to do, so people were meeting more each other... And doing things like "breaking rules" were sort of fancy. Probably something like jailbreaking iPhone...)
Sorry, for offtopic.... Back to topics..
AS native and VST3 for most/all plugins should come in 2-3 months....
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Step back a bit and reflect on Soundwides's portfolio needs for Reaktor-based products.
Redundant.
Other NI assets are more valuable to the big picture going forward. And the technical debt that inhibits progress for things like scalable GUI is huge.
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Spikes on M1/M2 might have something to do with big.little architecture. OS might wrongly reschedule heavy thread from performance cores to effective ones. And back. And also there might be problems with cache of the cores.
First gen of AMD Ryzens had such a problem, and 12th gen Intels fight with it right now.... Switching between different cores might cost valuable time as the content of cache has to be coppied, it is not shared by all cores.
I do not know if that is case of M1 (M2)...
Try to switch off effective cores and you will see if CPU spiked disapear....
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"A lot of Apple bashing, when actually almost everybody but NI did manage the transition to ARM - often in less than one year."
That's not true at all. I know enough audio plugin developers which haven't released a M1 native version of their plugins yet.
I would rather say that it's "most", not "almost everybody".
Again, the amount of work is highly dependant on how the plugin is coded. If you take Massive X for instance, I would figure it's more work, due to the fact that they made heavy use of a CPU extension (AVX) which is only present in x86 chips.
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And the technical debt that inhibits progress for things like scalable GUI is huge.
Yes, this is a massive issue.
It's very frustrating that resources which could be targeted at this and other long term needs in Reaktor, are instead being used just trying to keep up with Apple's aggressive upgrade strategy
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