Mac ARM binaries on download page?

(1) By Andrew Widdowson (widdowson) on 2022-03-21 15:02:23 [link] [source]

Hi there, I am wondering if the build pipeline and website maintainers would consider adding a "Precompiled Binaries for macOS (arm)" section to the download page? While x86 binaries can run via a translation layer on Apple silicon, it's pretty slow.

Thank you for considering! -Andrew

(2) By Simon Slavin (slavin) on 2022-03-21 19:19:06 in reply to 1 [source]

I did some testing on an M1 MacBook Pro. In real life applications, SQLite is input/output bound. In other words the majority of the time is spent reading or writing storage, not in processing. While it's possible to show faster performance in some benchmarks, it doesn't make a lot of difference in a real application.

The figures I got were not significant enough for me to design formal tests and publish the results, and were highly influenced by what my computer was doing in the background while the tests were running.

If you want to test it yourself, I did my M1 compilation entirely with tools included with macOS and Xcode. No Homebrew or anything like that.

(3) By Andrew Widdowson (widdowson) on 2022-03-22 00:23:15 in reply to 2 [link] [source]

Hi Simon,

I'm not surprised that performance microbenchmarks don't show noticable differences.

My observation is that an end-to-end run of a real load was taking about 16x longer to complete on a new M1 MacBook Pro than on a 5 year old Intel MacBook. Ultimately I'm interested in an applied performance win on real load. For all we know, the macOS translation layer may be (worst case) triggering unoptimized code paths in Apple-provided compatibility libraries. I don't think it's worth trying to hunt that down further, when a recompile should do the trick.

Thanks for considering, -Andrew