I am having some issues with my old and trusted macbook pro M1 which might mean I have to buy a new macbook computer.
Firstly, the issue: When I open the lid or reboot the computer, the screen will come on briefly (or not at all) and the go black with some faint vertical blue lines pulsating on the black background. I have searched the net for possible solutions, but so far nothing has worked. Any ideas are most welcome. The computer still works with an external display.
Secondly, if the issue cannot be resolved I will have to get a new macbook. I am considering three options:
Regarding using the laptop for SC (which is my main objective): Will I be able to reap the benefits of e.g. a M4 over M2 processor or is there something in the architecture of SC or osx preventing this? If the latter is the case, I might opt for the cheaper and lighter Air although it would be nice with the extra connectivity of the Pro (one more usbc-4 plug, HDMI, card reader)
I don’t think supercollider uses the GPU anywhere, so any advancements here are irrelevant. Similarly, sc doesn’t really benefit from additional CPU cores unless you are running a lot of other programs at once, or using supernova.
For sc, I’d go for whatever has the best single threaded performance (and at least cores).
Personally, I’d also want at least 6 cores, and 16gb of ram, and in excess of a terabyte of storage; IMO, anything less than this in 2025 is not worth it as memory is cheap and increasingly desired (I have three tabs open in chrome and they use 500mb)
Good points. RAM is different on the silicon macs, I don’t really know the exact technical ins and outs of why that is, but roughly, the 8GB rams I have been working with on my close to 5 year old M1 feels like 32GB maybe even 64GB on the intel based macs. The M1 was and still is extremely impressive when it comes to audio applications (not sure how it fares on video editing). I remember reading benchmarks comparing the base M1 Pro model against a totally decked out Intel machine which used to be 5-10 times the price of the M1, and for many tasks the M1 base model blew the intel machine out the water.
I have almost never had issues in SC even when running a big code with upwards of 5000 ugens, lots of sclang stuff and and an extensive GUI plus many tabs in browser, Davinchi, Logic Pro, OBS open the same time. Or rather all performance issues could be fixed by a restart of the computer.
I looked into the single threaded performance. Geekbench:
Scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 2500 (which is the score of an Intel Core i7-12700). Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance.
MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2024)
Apple M4 Max @ 4.5 GHz (16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores): 3883
MacBook Air (15-inch, 2023)
Apple M2 @ 3.5 GHz (8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores): 2599
MacBook Air (2022)
Apple M2 @ 3.5 GHz (8 cores): 2587
Here is something interesting and surprising. The M1 outperforms the M3 in track count on Ableton Live and Logic Pro X in this test:
Which according the the video has to do with the number of performance cores and efficiency cores. On a M1 there are 8 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores, whereas the M3 has 5 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. I don’t know or understand the difference between performance and efficiency cores, but apparently a lot of audio software can only utilize performance cores.
Here updated with the M4 which gives better multicore performance for all daws.
But as I understand, this does not affect SC performance. Or maybe it does if that one processor handling SC is faster? But probably just marginally?
