What does Apple Mac switching to custom ARM mean for Blender?

What about RISCV support ? :slight_smile:

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Remember, Blender 3.xx is gonna come after 2.93 LTS, so it’'ll probably be 2021. I think 2.93 LTS is planned to release late 2020. We’re not doing that crazy +0.01 increment after three years of work again!

On a slide in the Platforms State of the Union session they mentioned they worked on bringing Blender to ARM Macs (at 20:22)

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Is Apple willing to help Blender support metal?

We will probably find out within the next week. Apple said they are going to submit a patch bringing arm powered MacOS support to blender. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/102/?time=1222

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I intentionally wrote 3.x because a transition to Vulkan would take time, between implementation, testing and release. I don’t think it can be obtained already from a 2.93 LTS. And it is not said that it will happen before two more years.

With regard to Vulkan support, here is the current roadmap https://code.blender.org/2020/06/modules-roadmap-june-2020/

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It’s wonderful news! At this point it is only a matter of time and we will have Godot and Blender with a high performance Vulkan!

I completely doubt that Blender will work at all with Emulation (or make sense that is), because I have never seen emulation that works faster than the original and I doubt that ARM chips will just be magically faster, you have believed too much marketing blabla / geekbench synthetic benchmarks that mean nothing if you really believe that. Blender is a high performance tool, it is never fast enough, emulating it would be insanity.

How the hell do you quote in this strange forum???

quote:

I was wondering: Could this transition to ARM favor better porting of Blender on Raspberry PI 4? The latest version of the PI has 8 GB on board and it would be great to bring a Pocket Blender always ready for use (I think of school students, above all)

That does not make any sense: A RPI 4 ist waaaaaaaaaaaay too weak to be of any use to use Blender on. Even normal Systems are too slow, but a Raspberry Pi is totally the wrong poor performance system for that.

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With opengl the Raspberry 4, as you wrote, is not able to run Blender sufficiently. But adopting vulkan could not change the scenarios? Do you have any recommended single-board computer (SBC) solution for blender?

The news I have heard is that they will keep opencl and opengl, even in ARM. I figure after having tried to push every dev to use metal and port all their software (very expensive) they have noticed that on Mac OS, with the tiny tiny market share of around 10% only, nobody really cares and many software packages would be dropped and cancelled if that were to happen. They already destroyed a ton of software when they wiped out all 32 bit compatiblity (pretty much all games that existed on Mac OS and steam) This is, after all, not opensource, where you can just take the source code and recompile it. You have to convince each and every company to do the effort, also for older software.

So now they realized that they actually are not in that strong of a position (like on iOS), but a very weak one: The majority does not care about Mac OS, 90% of all users worldwide chose a PCs with Windows and Linux and they know why and that has been as long as Apple has existed.

Now I have seen the presentation and was surprised to see the name Blender there in a slide, but they did not say a word about it. I’m sure if the Blender Institute saw the slide, they heard Apple say “and Blender will be ported to ARM” and said “we are?”, having heard about it the very first time. :wink:

To me the presentation looked very weak (which is of course natural, talking about the early stage of development): They just threw a lot of names around, without facts behind it. Showing Linux ARM in a VM was also pretty weak, because Apple has shown a clear track record to not care about Linux. They showed Debian in the VM because they had nothing else to show. I’m a big Linux user and my specialty is Debian, but I know how Apple works and if it is not making them billions, they really don’t care about it, they are right now the greediest company on the face of the earth.

Conclusion:
They know what happens when they kill OpenCL and OpenGL, so they won’t, because it will nuke all that is left of all the software still available for Mac OS. When taking set theory, doing a Venn diagram, the intersection of all the apps that are available in 64bit (32 bit apps have been nuked) and all the Apps that will be recompiled for ARM64, plus the intersection of apps that got ported over from OpenCL to Metal Compute, PLUS OpenGL that has been ported to Metal, that intersection won’t be many apps anymore at all.

With opengl the Raspberry 4, as you wrote, is not able to run Blender sufficiently. But adopting vulkan could not change the scenarios? Do you have any recommended single-board computer (SBC) solution for blender?

Vulkan is not going to make a difference. It is more efficient, yes. But new tires on a vespa do not a 40 ton truck make. :wink:
No, none. SBCs are too weak, even laptops can be too weak for Blender. It of course depends on what you want to do with it, if you just model stuff that is fine, but rendering will be a problem, because the CPU will be way too weak and the GPU non existent (and not support the normal number crunching frameworks like CUDA (Nvidia) and OpenCL (AMD))
You also have to consider the RAM or the lack thereof (a GPU needs to have as much RAM as the scene needs). The ARM in the RPI 4 is way too weak for rendering. If we had Blender Benchmark, I could easily demonstrate by showing that a scene that you can render on a i9 Intel in 30 Minutes would take 20 hours on a RPI 4. We will get that chance, because I’m sure Blender and Blender Benchmark will get ported to ARM, but it might not happen in the next years.

I wanted to link to blender benchmark, but you are only allowed to use 2 links max :wink: LOL
I didn’t know links are expensive, you can easily find it by looking for Blender Benchmark in google or duckduckgo

(((Talking about RAM: I tried to load one of the open movie scenes (Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle)

into my Laptop that has 16 GB of RAM. It overfilled the RAM and crashed the laptop :wink: All that amazing glitz takes a lot of power.)))

The Blender Institute has much more important things to do than fix the invented and arbitrary problems de jour that Apple invents in their quest to make their users life’s as miserable as possible, for example wiping out tons of software that still worked in the last release of Mac OS.

They actually focus on providing bugfixes and new useful features.
Blender 3D is a special tool, a very powerful and super complex 3D Renderer that demands high specs from a machine to work properly. The RPI 4 is not in that category, not even close.

All SBC I know are very low powered, they have other purposes than high performance number crunching that powers 3D rendering. IoT needs to be power saving and possibly running on a battery.

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https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions

Great and very clear explanation! :wink: As an Italian I really liked the comparison with the Vespa! :smile: However far from me the idea of rendering on an SBC. Only in the school environment would it be right to do basic modeling and texturing, with simple and not complex objects to be completed in a few hours of work. The AMD solution mentioned by @megalomaniak would be too expensive for the kids.

When procured individually, yes. For a larger school procurement in bulk(say for multiple schools in a state/city) it would likely come with some discounts worked out.

At present, all I know is that the TEGRA series development boards of nvidia have desktop OpenGL and can run blender normally.

Interesting. But Tegra works mainly with Android OS. I know that nVidia has created Linux drivers but, to my knowledge, there is no distro specifically dedicated to Tegra. Between pros and cons, to avoid headaches, a classic mini-pc with intel or AMD chipset and Linux OS would be more appropriate for schools.

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Have you never heard of a project called “LINUX FOR TEGRA”? (L4T)This is official from NVIDIA.