Boinc on Mac?

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Endgame124

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Feb 11, 2008
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Has anyone used Boinc on a Mac? If so, how does it compare to similar hardware using linux? I ask since Apple is moving Mac to Arm:

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The new Mac Mini is using the new M1 chip @5nm could very well be the new performance per watt leader... unless there is a catch with running mac in general.
 
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StefanR5R

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I used it occasionally on a Yonah based Mac mini, in which I had replaced the Yonah by a Merom. It's been a while. I don't even remember anymore whether I used boinc on it only under Linux, or also under OS X. I suspect it was just Linux.

Endgame124 said:
The new Mac Mini is using the new M1 chip @5nm could very well be the new performance per watt leader... unless there is a catch with running mac in general.
Click to expand...
The general catch is that not all projects have an application build for OS X.
Initially, no or almost no project will have an application build for OS X on ARM. Perhaps you can use x86 emulation, but won't quite lead in performance per Watt then...
 
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StefanR5R

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PS, so far the Mac OS X platform is a walled garden. If it continues to be, then the adoption rate by Distributed Computing developers, as well as their success rate in stabilization and optimization, are going to be hit and miss.
 
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StefanR5R

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It's Apple's marketing claim versus the editor's opinion.
Further, we have got AnandTech's microbenchmarks of Apple's latest telephone.

Not a lot to go on.

StefanR5R said:
PS, so far the Mac OS X platform is a walled garden
Click to expand...
...which is plowed over and replanted before the crop was brought in. (They deprecate hardware, and more so: their software stack, quicker than you can say deprecation.)
 
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Endgame124

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Markfw

Markfw

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My favorite.... points/watt are hard to beat. 1/2 the cost of a 3990, but half the speed, but more than half the points. $2000 is not bad for 64 cores of efficiency. 4 5950z's may be way faster, but $2400 plus 4 motherboards, not one. And power efficiency is not good comparative. Those would be over 800 watts for 64 cores compared to 200.

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StefanR5R

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So Andrei estimates 20...24 W package power limit¹ of the M1 in the mini. Then I would say the 8 cores of Ryzen 7 4800U @ 15 W TDP (8 cores with SMT available; 7 nm tech) still compare quite favorably with m1's 4 cores (wider cores but without SMT, plus 4 small companion cores which may or may not be useful in a given scenario; 5 nm tech) in terms of throughput per socket power. The power budget of 4800U can be raised still without appreciable degradation of perf/W, as far as I can tell from the behavior of higher-wattage Zen 2 processors.

Edit,
¹) I should have written processor power limit or something, not package power limit. The package also contains DRAM.
 
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StefanR5R

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There is an attempt to reverse-engineer Apple M1 based computers for a Linux port (https://asahilinux.org/). They will have a go at Mac mini first. Let's just say: This is going to be _very_ difficult.
 
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StefanR5R

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While Linux on bare metal M1 Macs does not really appear feasible to me, one could go with Mac OS + a hypervisor which hosts a Linux VM for boinc which then executes Linux-on-ARM science applications (from projects which have those).

At a glance, working hypervisors appear to be Parallels Desktop and Canonical Multipass.
 
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