Hi, all, I’m looking at upgrading to a new MacBook Air with the M1 chipset. I was wondering if the Carbide software is compatible with this. I also use Fusion 360 and need to know the same. Thanks for any help.
It should work? This isn’t the first time Mac has changed the underlying chipset (I’m fairly positive previous iterations had a like emulation thing to make programs that worked on the old chipset work with the new one), so I’d expect there to be something on the OS to help those programs run on the new chipset (sort of like in an emulation mode?).
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The mother board chipset is not what decides if your OS will run Carbide SW. Check the comparability of your OS level. It is the OS that runs the programs not the chips.
Computer Requirements
The minimum requirements for Carbide Motion are:
PC:
Windows 8.2 or newer
4GB of RAM
MAC:
Mac/OSX 10.12 or newer
4GB of RAM
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Carbide Motion runs on Linux with the current kernel version and OS level.
But, only on an ARM version of Linux. Not on an Intel version. With the same OS level.
So the chipset has some effect.
The M1 is an ARM chip and uses ARM instructions, not Intel instructions. It is a totally different architecture to the one that Carbide3D are compiling Carbide Motion for.
MacOS Big Sur will translate these Intel instructions into ARM instructions and attempt to emulate the Intel MacOS experience.
This normally should work just fine, but you are right to be concerned. Hopefully someone in the community has tested this.
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Hi Jack,I am in the same position,my I Mac 2009 is struggling big time and one of our local retailers will not give a yes or no for the M1 chip.They do not have one yet as a demo but have suggested I come in and load up the carbide create when they have one in about 2 weeks which I said thank you and will take them up on it.
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I agree, Gerry. I’m not a computer genius, but I went through the change with Mac from the PowerPC to the Intel chipset and had a few issues with some of my programs. They used Rosetta or something like that to do the translations and it worked just so so. I was hoping someone else had already been a guinea pig for me. I really need to upgrade my current setup so I think I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!
Apple Dev Conference described an Intel ‘emulation’ layer to run legacy software, with software development kits available to use the M1 instruction set available for software writers to ‘easily migrate’ their code onto M1. So it may be that CM will run, maybe even at acceptable speeds, under emulation. Whether there is a 100% compatibility in the emulation layer is something I am yet to hear.
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What they’ve done for emulation is pretty clever.
I also think CM should run okay - the only “I wonder” part is that it uses a cross-platform toolkit and does USB work… sometimes these can a little tricky, but easy to test.
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I run a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2018 MacBook Pro. Only issue that caught me out was using a usb to usb-c adaptor on the 2018 machine did not agree with my Shapeoko. I bought a suitable usb-b/usb-c cable and no further issues. Seems it just didn’t like the adaptors.
no issues with Carbide Create 514 or Carbide Motion 521 on either from a software perspective.
Running Mac OS Big Sur on the 2018 MacBook (11.2)
The M1 Macs have an Intel -> ARM translation layer called Rosetta that allows them to have full compatibility with Intel CPU instructions.
So for regular applications, if it works on a regular Mac, it works on an M1 Mac.
What you have to watch out for is if you need extra device drivers. I don’t think Carbide Motion adds any drivers (it doesn’t on Windows IIRC) so it should work but no guarantees.
Worst case, use Parallels to run Windows.
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