Are there really many people doing serious number crunching on Macs? Laptops are definitely not suitable for that and Mac Pros have price-to-performance ratio heavily discouraging IMHO.
Probably not (if by āseriousā you mean exascale computing), but there are many of us who like to do code development on Macs. With some care, you can write portable shell scripts, makefiles, etc. between Macs and the large linux clusters that are the eventual targets for the codes, so it is a nice development environment. One advantage is that when it comes time to write the papers or make powerpoint presentations, all of the data and software are all right there together.
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Would the newest Intel ifx compiler work on multipass-installed Linux on Apple silicon Mac? Multipass itself is supposed to work on M1/M2 machines, so I guess it uses Intel CPU emulation.
I have the impression that newer macs M1/2/3 are very popular for AI inference, at least for developers and hobbyists, probably not for actually serving models. ggml/llama.cpp seems very mac focused. And this brings in a lot of developer interest.
No surprise hereā¦
I just setup a remote machine with an Intel Gen 13 processor, 128 GB and a NVidia 4070 to work on, works great. VSCode has a remote ssh extension that works great, so my 2017 iMac is now just an elaborate terminal.
IMO Apple has gone off the deep end again, they publicly announced that they would not make another 27" iMac which was one of the most popular models for content creators and high end users. My guess is the Apple M2/M3 didnāt have the thermal characteristics and performance to compete with the latest Intelā¦ it sure would be more cost effective to buy a 27" iMac with an Intel processor than a 27" studio display and a Mac M2 Pro at a cost of around $4500 before taxesā¦ ok I am ranting.
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The answer is no. Multipass does indeed work but it installs arm64 version of Ubuntu.
āarm64ā is the usual x86 64 bits architecture (including the Intel CPUs), so the Intel compiler supports it.
The ARM architecture is not compatible with x86 (aside from software emulation).
As Intel currently does not produce ARM CPUs, Intel compilers do not support the ARM platform.
Thus as a consequence of Apple switching to the ARM platform, there will be no Intel compilers that support current Apple Silicon chips.
My bad, I read āarm64ā but was thinking āamd64ā!
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