FME Desktop 2020 on Mac with a M1 Apple Silicon CPU

Over the break I had a chance to try an M1 Macbook Air. I was using FME 2021 betas (and ironically an overlay as well). You can see my tweet about my experience over at https://twitter.com/DaleAtSafe/status/1344439793854234624, but in short, I found quite comparable performance between intel mac and m1 mac doing a massive point on area overlay (which seems to be everyone's favorite speed test case...)

Now, in my case I have feature table/bulk mode input — I'm reading CSV and Shape — and in FME 2021 we've greatly optimized memory use in that scenario. As in on Intel anyway it uses 1/7th the memory, at least in this scenario, as compared to raw features.

I looked at your test case and if you wanted, you could put in AttributeKeepers and turn on the "create bulk mode" switch if you wanted to try FME 2021 beta on that. Or recreate your FFS files to be feature tables using this trick and then run from there -- that would give best performance.

I too saw that the memory reported was greater on the M1 Mac than the Intel Macs. but saw very comparable performance. It could be the way the architecture reports things, or it could be because we're not native, but agreed that it seems the base memory overhead is higher on M1...but if we can use bulk mode we're set up for the win it seems.

Will be very interesting to do more testing and understand the scenarios better.

In terms of porting FME, our biggest hurdle is that we use Qt, and officially we've read that Qt won't support M1 until Qt 6.1. They just released 6.0. But we do see this as an important opportunity and are pretty excited to see what kind of performance we'll end up with once we're over on that side...