Hi Dennis,

  The ChimeraX "macOS" distribution contains binaries in both M1/M2 and Intel formats while the "macOS M1 or M2" distribution under "Other releases" does not contain the Intel versions.  Most Mac applications distribute both M1/M2 and Intel as a single distribution so it will work on any Mac machine, so we do the same.  That is called a "universal distribution".  It is larger than the M1/M2 only ChimeraX distribution (417 Mbytes vs 279 Mbytes).  So if you know your Mac is an M1/M2 (or M3), you can download the smaller distribution and it will download a bit faster and take less disk space.  It will run identically to the distribution that contains both M1/M2 and Intel, same speed, same memory use.  When running the universal distribution macOS only uses the M1/M2 binaries if that is the CPU type of your machine.

  The ChimeraX native M1/M2 (also works on M3) distribution is significantly faster than the using the Intel ChimeraX with Rosetta emulation on a Mac M1/M2 machine.  Here's our web page where I tested that showing opening an large PDB model was 50% faster

https://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/data/czi-nov2021/apple_m1.html

  Tom


On Nov 14, 2023, at 3:16 AM, Dennis Dannecker via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:

Hello,

I have a question regarding running ChimeraX on Apple's M1 chip.

About two years ago (Nov 2, 2021), there was a post by Tom announcing the development of a version of ChimeraX that would run natively on Apple M1 instead of emulting for the Intel processor.

Looking in the download section, I see such a native version is now regularly released. However, I am wondering what is the differen between the "macOS M1 or M2" and "macOS". While the former is only for M1 and M2, the latter on is for M1, M2, and Intel Macs, this one is also quite larger in size.
If one is working on a macOS M1 (or M2) machine, is it correct to go for the "macOS M1 or M2"? Would that correspond to natively running ChimeraX and provide the best possible performance, or should one always go for the "macOS" release?

I am currently updating my hardware, and since I am working quite a bit with ChimeraX, I would like to also inform my decisions based on the available ChimeraX releases.

Thank you very much.

Best regards

Dennis

Dennis Dannecker
Master Student of Biochemistry
Department of Chemistry
Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
University of Cologne
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
50923 Cologne, Germany
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