[R-SIG-Mac] Apple Silicon aka M1 Macs

[Taras Zakharko]

Thank you for this update! I think that Apple Silicon has great potential for data science, the SPEC benchmarks reported by Anandtech look very encouraging. 

My M1 Mac should be arriving shortly, is there some way one could help out with the effort? 

— Taras

> On 17 Nov 2020, at 15:57, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> Mine (a 8GB MBA) arrived today, so I have started doing some comparisons.
> 
> For the CRAN build of R 4.0.3, §2.8 of R-admin recommends checking the installation with
> 
> pdf("tests.pdf") ## optional, but prevents flashing graphics windows
> Sys.setenv(LC_COLLATE = "C", LC_TIME = "C", LANGUAGE = "en")
> tools::testInstalledBasic("both")
> tools::testInstalledPackages(scope = "base")
> tools::testInstalledPackages(scope = "recommended")
> 
> That took 454s (using Rosetta) against 895s for my late-2016 MBP (2.9GHz i5): happily nothing untoward was reported (some recommended packages give differences from reference output on both systems).
> 
> You need to install XQuartz to provide the X11() devices and support for package Tcl/Tk: everything I tried using that worked as expected.
> 
> Having done that post-installation check I would happily use the Intel R on an M1 machine.
> 
> We plan to check many of the Intel-compiled packages under Rosetta.
> 
> There are many hours of work ahead to build/test a native toolchain: our goal is to have a native distribution for R 4.1.0 ca April 2021.
> 
> -- 
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley using stats.ox.ac.uk
> Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
> 
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