macOS transition to Apple Silicon (ARM)

[RangaBear]

macOS transition to Apple Silicon (ARM):

Hi Folks, first time posting on the forums. (Long time listener, first time caller).

Just curious as to the Development of Handbrake for macOS, with the pending transition to Apple Silicon (ARM).
Will the macOS development cease once macOS has fully transitioned away from Intel processors?

Or if the development is to continue, what development cycle could we see?
Would it be an easy port, to Apple Silicon (ARM)?

I'm curious and possibly jumping the gun here... but I've managed to have a nice stable build,
from the source code, on my macOS machine (High Sierra) and I'd like to continue in that trend if possible.

Operating system and version : macOS 10.13 High Sierra

[Ritsuka]

Development will continue on both. For how long no one knows, it will depend how easy will be to support Intel Macs, but we will know only in four years or more.

HandBrake already runs on Apple Silicon

[mduell]

Performance (with x264/x265) or efficiency (with T2) is going to be garbage on the ARM based Macs.

[rollin_eng]

Performance (with x264/x265) or efficiency (with T2) is going to be garbage on the ARM based Macs.

While I agree with you I assume the ARM based Macs will start on their laptop ranges.

But if they cant get close to Intel in x264/265 and other CPU intensive tasks they will basically have to kill the MacPro, iMacPro and maybe high end MacBook Pros.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

[Ritsuka]

I wouldn't bet too much against Apple's CPUs.

[mduell]

Performance (with x264/x265) or efficiency (with T2) is going to be garbage on the ARM based Macs.

While I agree with you I assume the ARM based Macs will start on their laptop ranges.

But if they cant get close to Intel in x264/265 and other CPU intensive tasks they will basically have to kill the MacPro, iMacPro and maybe high end MacBook Pros.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

iMac is widely rumored to be one of the first switches, along with the 13" MBP.

I think a lot of code generally will be fine, but without a lot of ARM SIMD work for x264/x265 it's going to be grim.

[rollin_eng]

I wouldn't bet too much against Apple's CPUs.

Is someone in the know

iMac is widely rumored to be one of the first switches, along with the 13" MBP.

I think a lot of code generally will be fine, but without a lot of ARM SIMD work for x264/x265 it's going to be grim.

The low end iMac/Laptops make sense as I imagine they are mainly used for email/web/office stuff.

What I am wondering is will the iPhone still get new chips first, or will PC's get them first???

If they can't get close to Intel on real world tests then I can't see how they can sell it to "Power" users.

[s55]

HandBrake has been running on Linux ARM64 for a few years now, though we don't officially supported it.
Also, ARM has NEON SIMD optimisations for both x264 and x265


Big Buck Bunny 1080p to 1080p using "Fast 1080p30" preset gives about 15fps on my ARM Cortex A-72 Quad Core 1.5GHz


WARNING: This is back of the envelope math based on educated guesses with limited foundation. It could and probably will be wrong to some extend!
I DO NOT have apple silicon to test this theory on!

If we take 15ps on an A72 as a baseline.

We know the rough performance of the A12 and A13 due to the iPad. (They have several times faster IPC per clock than A72)
We know the clock speeds are near 2.7Ghz for A13
We know it's big little design. So 4 performance cores.


Rumours: (We don't actually know)
- Rumour has it the first chips for Apple Macs will be 12 core. I'd wager if this is true that it'll be in a 8 big, 4 little config.
- Educated guess that clock speeds will be at-least 3Ghz


BaseLine 15fps. Educated guess based on some performance benchmarks by tech sites. We are probably talking ~3+ times faster CPU cores on Apple devices at present than my A72

So, 15x3 = 45fps.
Double the clock speed from 1.5 to 3 = 90fps
Double the cores = ~180fps

If it was in that kind of ballpark, it's not unreasonable. That's current gen hardware that I suspect is unlikely to actually release in a production ARM mac.

I suspect we'll see an A14 in released machines and no-one really knows how they will perform but they have a really strong ARM core so I really don't think performance will be so bad in the grand scheme of things.


The biggest unknowns is what they are going to do in their higher end macs. We have seen nothing yet in these areas.

[mduell]

It's relatively straightforward to scale ARM out to 32-64 cores (see Graviton, etc), and I expect Apple will do just that for the Mac Pro.

But anything that is vector-heavy and not recompiled or re-written (for asm) is going to be rough via SIMD-free translation.

[s55]

It's relatively straightforward to scale ARM out to 32-64 cores (see Graviton, etc), and I expect Apple will do just that for the Mac Pro.

Probably. Remains to be seen. They also have to support Powerful GPUs and it's unclear if they'll retain support for AMD at the moment. Slides so have have suggested otherwise. Your starting to talk some pretty damn large chips here and it's not something we've seen their silicon team do before.

So yeh, will be very interesting to see how/when they scale this.

But anything that is vector-heavy and not recompiled or re-written (for asm) is going to be rough via SIMD-free translation.

It's going to suck to begin with if a lot of apps are not recompiled. HandBrake will be recompiled to be native on the new Apple macs. Overall performance isn't looking like it's going to be a significant issue currently.

Other apps may be different but that's another debate in itself.

[rollin_eng]

HandBrake already runs on Apple Silicon

Now that these are released can anyone comment on speed/performance?

[Ritsuka]

We can't comment on the actual performance of the DTK.
But the nightly builds are already Universal and a Universal 1.4.0 beta will be released today or tomorrow, so feel free to buy a new Mac and post the results

[rollin_eng]

We can't comment on the actual performance of the DTK.
But the nightly builds are already Universal and a Universal 1.4.0 beta will be released today or tomorrow, so feel free to buy a new Mac and post the results

I would buy one if I had any use for it.

I just assumed you had a test model but seems the terms don’t allow you to comment even now.

[jbellanca]

So here's my preliminary, unscientific results with my new M1 Mac Mini. Encoded an episode of Stargate Atlantis (from BluRay 1080p source with passthrough DTS audio) in h.265, medium, quality 24.

1. v1.3.3 using Rosetta > 1hr 17min
2. 1.4.0 beta 1 universal binary > 1h 04 min