AppleSilicon compatibility

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Valter
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AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by Valter » Fri Nov 27, 2020 1:25 pm

Hi all,
Is QCAD compatible with AppleSilicon+ Rosetta2. Second question: is a native version for AppleSilicon planned, if so, when will it be available?

Regards

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andrew
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by andrew » Fri Nov 27, 2020 2:01 pm

Valter wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 1:25 pm
Is QCAD compatible with AppleSilicon+ Rosetta2.
This is unknown at this point. We will find out in December.
Valter wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 1:25 pm
Second question: is a native version for AppleSilicon planned, if so, when will it be available?
This depends on the Qt and OpenDesign libraries, both essential for QCAD and both not currently readily available for Apple M1. For this reason, we don't have a time table for QCAD on M1.

Valter
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by Valter » Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:40 pm

Thanks for your reply. I'll check for updates :)

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andrew
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by andrew » Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:49 pm

I can now confirm that QCAD works very well on Apple Silicon (M1) through Rosetta 2. So far we have not found any problem at all and it easily outperforms QCAD on any Intel machine we have here.

Valter
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Joined: Fri Nov 27, 2020 1:19 pm

Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by Valter » Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:32 am

Hello,
I confirm. I run a relatively old version of QCAD Pro (3.19.2.0) without any problems. However, I am waiting a native version ;)
Thanks

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andrew
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by andrew » Fri Dec 11, 2020 10:53 am

I'm happy to confirm that we have QCAD Professional up and running on Apple Silicon M1 as native arm64 binary (including the OpenDesign libraries). We will release a snapshot of that package shortly and this will very likely be a download option for the next stable release.

TSG
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by TSG » Fri Dec 11, 2020 12:59 pm

@Andrew
Good news.
I am looking forward to the increase in performance.
Can you at least roughly quantify the performance difference between Intel / Rosetta / ARM?
Since I have to update my hardware (iMac), I wonder if I should wait for the ARM iMac.

Thomas
Ich will nicht streiten. Ich will nur deutlich machen, dass ich Recht habe und DU NICHT.

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andrew
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Re: AppleSilicon compatibility

Post by andrew » Fri Dec 11, 2020 2:14 pm

I suppose that depends a lot on what you do.

Here's a very rough, non-representative comparison of copying 200'000 lines from one location to another in QCAD:

iMac 2019, 3.6GHz Intel Core i9: ~19s
MacBook Pro 2020, M1 3.2GHz, Intel binary running with Rosetta 2: ~15s
MacBook Pro 2020, M1 3.2GHz, native arm64 binary: ~12s

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