Hey all, I just wanted to ask if anybody has experience already with Apple’s new M1 processors (Apple M1 Chip - Apple) and how they get along with Stan?

Hey Paul! No experience, just linking the following: [image] Anyone planning on getting an M1 machine to benchmark? Developers One aspect we’ve never really had the opportunity to test is exactly how good Apple’s cores are in terms of memory bandwidth. Inside of the M1, the results are ground-breaking: A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and som… Cheers, Max

thanks! I should learn to use the search function better :-D

One more small benchmark here: Detect the use of the M1 ARM-based CPU and suggest adding CXX · Issue #365 · stan-dev/cmdstanr · GitHub In general, ARM processors are super nice to Stan, more so with parallelization (using reduce_sum). I have more recent experience with Linux ARM but there is the same story here. On Linux ARM we have seen models run from 50% to up to 3x faster (same number of cores). I think its mostly due to better use of caches.

It’s funny that the intel tbb makes things fly on arm!

When can we expect to be able to install Rstan natively on M1 Macs? Will this coincide with the native build of R 4.1?

[image] awellis: Will this coincide with the native build of R 4.1? That is correct. Only option for native compiling of Stan in R until then is CmdStanR.

ok, thanks. There’s really no way to get Rstan? I’m running R dev for aarch64, and it works fine so far.

There is an experimental version of R for native use on m1: https://mac.r-project.org/ With that you could build rstan from source natively. But I have no idea how safe that is and if it works for rstan. Edit: oh i guess you meant this with rdev on aarch64.

yes, that’s the R build I’m using. I’ll try installing Rstan

I’ve installed Rstan, Rstanarm, brms. So far, Stan (via brms) seems to compile and sample about 3x faster on my M1 Macbook Air than on my work laptop (2 year old 13" Macbook Pro, quad-core i7).

Apple's new M1 processors and Stan

General

Max_Mantei March 9, 2021, 4:38pm 2

Hey Paul!

No experience, just linking the following:

Cheers,
Max

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Apple's new M1 processors and Stan

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