Is anyone planning on buy an M1 Mac soon? Even if it were just for testing, you can buy Macs at most stores in the USA today and still be able to return them up until Jan 31 next year...so that would give you/us 70+ days to test.

I might test the Macbook Pro since it should likely perform better than the Air with such a CPU intensive app.

I'm not a Mac person but the new M1 Macbooks have gotten some really great real-world performance feedback the past few days. This short video seems very impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNNTXd85VXo

So far, so good, and seemingly very fast. Again, M1 Macbook Air.



https://imgur.com/a/GjQ7B6r

I will have an opportunity to start testing on a M1 Mac Mini that will be arriving Tuesday/Wednesday and am looking forward to comparing it against some other machines running World Community Grid.

For example, on a 2018 Mac Mini with an Intel Core i7-8700B CPU (6 core, 12 threads) I’ve been seeing an average of ~56,000 points per day and 105 WUs per day on the OpenPandemics project. In cooler ambient temperatures (58-65 degrees F), that Mac Mini draws ~87 watts while crunching and thus I am seeing about 27,000 points per kWh and 51 WUs per kWh. From reading https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-m...-so-crazy-after-all/3/#h1 and https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested , my hypothesis is that the M1 Mac Mini is going to be about 5% faster running the WCG through Rosetta 2 than the Late-2018 Mac Mini with the Intel Core i7 chip (the Geekbench multi-core score of the M1 Mac Mini under Rosetta 2 is 5,776 compared to 5,469 for the Intel i7 Mac Mini). However, it sounds like the M1 will be potentially drawing only 31 watts under full load which would translate to a whopping ~79,000 points per kWh and ~150 WUs per kWh on the OpenPandemics project. That would be quite an efficiency improvement!

I’ll share an update later next week once I’ve had a chance to test on the M1 Mac Mini.

I bought a Macbook Air 8GB RAM 256GB drive this weekend. Here are my findings so far after about 24 hours of running WCG with Mapping Cancer Markers:

1)WCG runs quite sporatically on this machine. At times it runs 4 threads, sometimes 8, other times 7. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason why.

2)Building on #1, sometimes WCG shows a Waiting For Memory message on 4 threads while 4 other threads are running. Then, magically, it goes away after X amount of minutes/hours and either runs all 8 threads or drops to 4 (without the Memory message). I tried increasing the amount of Memory WCG is allowed to use to 100% and that seems to have helped. But 12 hours later after it was running 8 threads for at least 2 hours, it's down to 4 threads again. This could be some kind of thermal heating issue (since there is no fan in the Air) so maybe I will try moving the machine outside tonight while it's about 38 degrees (F) and seeing if 8 threads start to work. The bottom of the machine is barely warm.

3)WCG is using over 500MB of RAM for each thread. However, my Windows 10 machine only uses 78MB RAM for each thread. Anyone know why? 500MB seems excessive but possibly WCG is sending the Macbook far more complex work units than my Win10 box (Intel i7-7700).

4)MCM is taking about 3-5 hours per thread. This seems normal.


Unrelated to WCG, this Air is pretty awesome. It is absolutely silent and extremely responsive. Since my mom is going to be using it for lightweight stuff, 8GB is plenty. But I did notice that freshly logged into the Air the system is already using 4GB of RAM. If anyone is thinking of buying an Air and using it more than a web browser, I would highly recommend getting 16GB of RAM.

If you have questions or things you want me to try, let me know. I have the machine until Tuesday morning.

I'm leaning toward cpu throttling in general, too. I'm not a Mac lover but do follow their products from a tech point of view...their past few years of MacBooks have had serious thermal issues as well as cpu throttling. People paying $1500+ for a "pro" machine have been quite upset

I do have an iMac that is 2 releases old which does not seem to throttle.

If I had the time, I would go buy a MacBook Pro and compare it to this Air since the main difference is 1 extra core and the Pro includes a fan.

But as I said earlier, WCG aside, this Air rocks for $899! Also, the power adapter gets nowhere near as hot as the past 10 years of MacBooks. Mine is barely warm with WCG running 24x7.