Is MATLAB supported on Apple Silicon Macs?

Macs with an Apple silicon processor such as the Apple M1 have two ways to run applications. Applications built for Apple silicon run natively, while apps built for Intel processors run in the Rosetta 2 environment. Which method does MATLAB support? 

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Rosetta 2 

MATLAB R2020b Update 3 and later are supported on Apple silicon Macs through the Rosetta 2 translation environment. Earlier releases of MATLAB may run but are not fully supported. 

There are two products which are available on Intel-based Macs but are not compatible with the Rosetta 2 environment: Polyspace and Simulink Desktop Real-Time. 

Native Apple Silicon 

A version of MATLAB which runs natively on Apple silicon is in development. This answer will be updated with more information as development progresses. 

[Xiao Zang]

Kudos to Matlab team for the quick move!!

[Ben Joyce]

Yes, this is great news.

[Zonghao zou]

Do we have any ideas as in when the native apple silicon version will be avaliable? (sometime next year? )

[cr]

@MathWorksSupportTeam

When will Matlab for native M1 be available? Sharing some kind of outlook would be immensely helpful in making better decisions.

[Michel Georges Decker]

Probably a dumb question but: is Simulink Desktop Real-Time needed for Models that are not calculated in real-time?

[cr]

No, it's not required.

[Mohammad Sami]

For the optimized versions, would MATLAB be use the built in neural engine and machine learning accelerator for the deep learning toolbox and statistics and machine learning toolbox?

[Irene Mendez Guerra]

Will the optimized versions enable GPU acceleration on Apple silicon?

[Ravi Kohli]

Does this mean that MATLAB doesn't work on the new apple silicon devices for the time being?

[John Johnson]

"Kudos to Matlab team for the quick move!!"

Apple Silicon has been available to developers since last summer.

[Walter Roberson]

Developer Transition Kit was announced June 22, 2020, which was two days into Summer. Some developers received it about June 28, 2020 or June 29, 2020 https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/29/first-benchmarks-surface-for-apples-arm-based-developer-transition-kit/

So if "last summer" refers to the summer most immediately past, then Yes, it was available to developers "since last summer".

The R2020b Pre-Release was available to MATLAB beta test users no later than June 10, 2020.... which was before Apple Silicon became available. Mathworks policy is that after a pre-release has been made available to customers, that bug fixes may be made, and new features under trial may be removed before actual release, but that no new features may go in: internal Mathworks developers who do not have their features ready for external testing by the internal cut-off date have to wait for the next release (or at least an Update), even if the feature becomes internally ready even just a few days later.

The official R2020b release date was September 16, 2020. The official release date of the Apple M1 to consumers was September 17, 2020.

Thus, there was no realistic chance that Mathworks would have added Apple Silicon support to the R2020b release.

[Mike Bryant]

When will MATLAB R2020b Update 3 be available for download? I just tried to download and the latest available is Update 2.

[Bruno Luong]

Release 3 is already available since few days (for Windows). You might need you check with Help->Check for Update

[Winneyy]

How can I get in touch with up-to-date information or updates concering the availability of native MATLAB for MacBook Silicon?, through this post or through official post on your website?

[Luke]

Please do update this answer with more information as it becomes available. In particular: will 2021b have ARM support?

[Walter Roberson]

R2020b already has ARM support -- through Rosetta2 .

[BISHAL Kr DAS]

when can I expect the Native Silicon version to come out?

[Rik]

I doubt you will get anything more than speculation. Mathworks will probably mention it in the release notes for the prerelease (note that in general that would be under NDA).

[LeChat]

Will Matlab next version enable GPU acceleration on Apple silicon? Will the Deep Learning and Image processing toolboxes take advantage of the M1 integrated GPUs and neural engine?

[Rik]

@LeChat Mathworks generally doesn't discuss plans for the future in public (you could contact support, who will either refuse to talk specifics, or offer an NDA). Some next version of Matlab will probably enable GPU acceleration on Apple ARM chips, but I doubt R2021b will be that version. As R2021a is only working through Rosetta 2, I expect full support of more niche features (i.e. everything except the base product) will take a while.

[Walter Roberson]

"Will Matlab next version enable GPU acceleration on Apple silicon?"

No. Do not expect that for numerous years. Mathworks only supports Nvidia CUDA, and would have to completely redesign its gpu acceleration tool chain for anything else.

Mathworks goes where the market is, and research work is currently mostly on Nvidia, with second place in the market being IBM, and AMD based development far behind those two. Apple M1 development is comparatively small at the moment, and has no support for Windows or Linux. When Mathworks finally diversifies GPU it would make more sense for it to go after IBM (researchers) or AMD (commonly installed on desktops and laptops) before going after M1.

[LeChat]

Thank you both for your answers and views on Mathworks perspectives. For the mac users (actually with Intel cpu and latest macOS, or M1+ Silicon chips), do you know if it is possible to use a eGPU just for Matlab? I know Nvidia gpu drivers are not available in the latest MacOS versions anymore, and that nvidia gpus are not Metal compatible, but is there a built-in matlab support for a Nvidia eGPU option, so that the OS uses the integrated gpu of the computer while Matlab uses the eGPU acceleration?

[Walter Roberson]

There is no built-in support for egpu. MATLAB just uses whatever drivers are available

[Walter Roberson]

Also, the M1 requires Big Sur (or later), but there is no NVIDIA eGPU support for Big Sur, as Apple made it difficult to add shared drivers other than those approved by Apple -- and Apple apparently won't approve any eGPU drivers that are not designed for Metal.

[Ramy Elkhazendar]

Can we get this moving faster. Its been 5 months now! need a Native version ASAP! Performance gains are too good to pass

[Walter Roberson]

Well, 7 months if you count from the time that the M1 became available to consumers. One release has happened, and it improved the M1 performance and made more of it native. There will not be another release until close to the September equinox.

You should have a look, by the way, at Microsoft's efforts to implement for ARM. Their 64 bit OS for ARM barely works at present, and has not reached "beta" level.

[Justin Kottinger]

I am having major issues with MATLAB 2021a on my m1 Mac. The issues include: sudden crashes, unresponsive application, incorrect app loading, etc. The behavior is so terrible that I some days I give up trying to use the app entirely. Is anyone else having these issues? Will a native version be available anytime soon?

[Antony Ware]

I've started seeing crashes too, seemingly related to the editor. Selecting and pasting text often (almost always) results in an immediate crash. I'm running the latest 2021a on an M1 Macbook Pro. Anyone else?

[Joris]

Same issue here. Sudden crashes, seem to happen after pasting text.

Slow response to clicking with cursor, running and running sections. Where on my pc runnnig a section would be instant now it takes seconds. Especially the slow cursors is annoying, make selecting sections and text nearly impossible. Clicking on save now takes multiple seconds instead of instant response time.

Specs:

Macbook Air M1 16GB

Matlab R2021a

Any updates on M1 release?

[Anders Eriksson]

I can confirm that this issue has been appearing in R2020b as well. So it seems like there is something thats related to changes made by apple in macOS 11.3-11.4

[Dror Liran]

edit: I have updeted to update 5 and everything is much better

I experince the same issues with R2020b, is extreamly slow response.

Any solution for that?

MBP M1 16gb, macos 11.3

[Sangjae]

When will native M1 support be available? The current version is so slow that it can't be used in practice and often gets stuck. I'm currently switching between Windows and Ubuntu as a workaround, but it's very inconvenient.

[Rik]

@Sangjae They will probably not make any public statements prior to updating this answer. Any definitive answer will probably be very short term (e.g. in the release notes of a prerelease). I would not expect it for R2021b.

[Royi Avital]

@Walter Roberson, What do you mean beta for Windows on ARM. Windows on ARM was 64 Bit from day one (If I rememeber correctly). You mean x64 Bit Emulation which is in the testing. This is emulation of x64 on 64 Bit ARM (Equivalent to Rosetta 2).

[Walter Roberson]

@Royi Avital

You are correct to make a distinction between the operating system (which would potentially have been all compiled for native work) and the x64 emulation. Potentially the operating system might be more stable than the emulation.

However... the review sites that I looked at back in April all said that the operating system itself was unstable as well, even when running programs that had been compiled for ARM. It is true, though, that the x64 emulation was cited as being significantly worse than the x86 emulation.

Either way, the point stands that Microsoft's ARM implementation is notably behind Apple's ARM implementation in terms of being able to run MATLAB with any hope of stability.

[jiayi su]

It has been ONE YEAR.

[Walter Roberson]

jiayi su:

The official release date of the Apple M1 to consumers was September 17, 2020, which was the day after the R2020b release. Mathworks has had one release since then, R2021a.

R2021b is expected to be released within the next two weeks (my guess is that will be either today or tomorrow.)

[Walter Roberson]

@jiayi su as I predicted R2021b was released the same day.

[jiayi su]

@Walter Roberson But no Apple Silicon Support, either

[Stanislas Grare]

@Walter Roberson is it possible to know, for 2021b, which part is M1 native and which part is not yet ? By part I mean a toolbox, for example if I say Simscape Electrical, how will I know if it is M1 native or not ?

[Walter Roberson]

@Stanislas Grare

I am presently not aware of any method to tell which parts are M1 native.

For whatever it is worth, when I use the tool at https://github.com/DigiDNA/Silicon then no part of MATLAB is reported as being a Universal binary.

I do not know if that is the same thing as saying that nothing is implemented in Native.

[Bruno Luong]

??? Is there any benefit to deploy partial native M1 code ? Is it even possible ?

[Rik]

@Walter Roberson can you find an official date for the release? I edited the Wikipedia entries based on your comment, but I can only find pages dated 2021/09/23 with mentions of R2021b (so I'm now changing those dates).

2021/09/22 18:06 (GMT): es.mathworks.com still has R2021a

2021/09/23 11:04 (GMT): www.mathworks.com updated to R2021b

The Bing cache doesn't report the time in the header (the d= doesn't seem to be in any date format I can parse), but it mentions being from 2021/09/23 and still has R2021a on the www homepage.

[Steven Lord]

Release R2021b was released to the website the evening of September 22nd Eastern time. That could have been the morning of September 23rd in GMT.

So what you consider the "official date" for the release depends where you are. I would call it September 22nd as that's when it was released in the time zone where MathWorks HQ is located.

[Rik]

I just didn't expect it would be released in the evening of the HQ time zone. I'm a bit surprised that the only dates mentioned anywhere are 'September 2021'. I guess it is in line with how general the release date is phrased beforehand, but I find the insistance on avoiding exact dates a bit odd. Or is that just my neuroticism and completionism?

[Walter Roberson]

Mathworks does not commit to exact release dates in advance. They have internal deadlines for various aspects such as go/no-go on new features, but after that it is "as soon as all the parts are ready". That can include time to iron out priority problems identified during testing.

Documentation such as release notes and advertisements cannot be finalized until all of the go/no-go decisions are made.

Software testing usually involves assuming that all features will be released, so if any features are withdrawn then additional software testing is required.

Historically, it also included a wait period for the final software version to be pressed onto DVD, as the new version is available for physical order on day of release.

The last several years, releases have never been before 1730 Eastern time the day of release. After, that is, peak site usage for the day.

Answer 2

[BH]

I installed 2020b on my M1 MBP today. Just thought I’d post here to let you know it runs even if it’s not officially supported

[Pierre Morel]

Could you post your best bench(5) results in Matlab on the MBP through rosetta ?

[Bruno Luong]

Can you post the result of

bench

command? Thanks.

[cr]

Viola! Appreciate you dropping an update to confirm it works. Can you please post results and screenshots of the following bench command?

>> bench(5)

What's your RAM 8GB or 16GB?

Thanks!

[BH]

8 GB RAM and 256 GB disk on R2020b Update 1 (9.9.0.1495850)

[Bruno Luong]

Anyone would bet how much gain we woud get when it runs without rosetta?

[cr]

Thanks mate.

Emulation seems to be working well on compuations but graphics are slow. Definitely looking forward to see Matlab running natively on Apple silicon.

[Wenqing Kang]

Hey BH, could you please let me know how you installed 2020b? I downloaded installer but the M1 chip Macbook Pro won't let me install, saying I need contact the administrator while I am the administrator. I believe we have the same Macbook model. Thanks.

[BH]

I didn't have any issues installing it normally so can't help you there sorry

[clappertown]

I tried Matlab R2019a on Macbook Pro 13 w/ M1 and for the same code it took 525s to finish, comparing to 456s running in Matlab R2019a on Macbook Pro 16" i9@2.4GHz.

[Shinya]

Wenquig,

This method worked for me.

I went to /Volumes/matlab_R2020b_maci64 in the terminal after mounting the image and did

# sudo open InstallForMacOSX.app

You'd have to type your password in after this command.

[cr]

Clappertown Thanks for sharing your findings. Did you check equivalency of the results from both computers?

[Richard]

Really?? Tell us please, how does the performance compare?

[Antony Ware]

I'm running 2019a, and bench produced the following scores: 0.1272 0.0836 0.0151 0.0836 3.9532 3.8510

This is overall about 60% as fast as an Intel i5 2.6GHz macbook pro, apparently.

[Amit Singh]

This video is helpful for knowing the performance of MATLAB on Macbook pro M1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNAwmu_tK7Y

[Ravi Kohli]

Thanks for the post. Does MATLAB actually work in that current (unsupported) state or is it quite buggy/glitchy?

[Ethan Woo]

I was having trouble getting R2020b to install on my M1 mac mini today, but I JUST got it!! I kept getting the "You need to contact administrator" message. I tried messing around with the terminal command (sudo open blah blah) but that didn't work. I just kept trying and trying. I also installed rosetta 2 using

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

From there, I right-clicked InstallForMacOSX and selected "show package contents" - then, I navigated to Contents > MacOS. Then I double-clicked InstallForMacOSX. This brings up a terminal window that basically does nothing because it can't find a var file. So i opened another terminal window, and navigated to that crazy var file. Then, I opened the matlab_R2020b_maci64.dmg file on my desktop and double clicked the InstallForMacOSX and it actually started bouncing for the first time..

I have no idea what made it finally work. Maybe just luck... but hopefully this helps someone!

[Annie Leonhart]

All you need to do to make it work is go to "show package content" Matlab/xxxx/bin/maci64/matlabwindow.app that's pretty much it. Click that and it'll run. Nothing special you need to do. Create an alias on your dock.

Been using 2020b for weeks with 0 issues. Runs just as good as it does on PC. Fully functional.

[Ronald Prentice]

I have 2021a update 2 and it's stil very slow. Any idea when the version that will run natively on the M1 chip will be available?

[Walter Roberson]

I expect R2023b for the fully native version.

Answer 3

[Moritz Kb]

It works fine on the new MBA although battery consumption is huge, meaning 3hrs from 100% to 0%.

Hopefully this will improve when it’s running natively... Also 2D and 3D times in ‘bench’ are very Slow probably because they don’t run on the GPU cores?

[Tony Davis]

The MacOS 11.1 update (out today) improved 2D and 3D 'bench' times by about a factor of 3 compared to 11.0 on my M1-based Mac Mini. Matlab 2020b Update 3 works extremely well on this setup.

[Moritz Kb]

Agreed! 2D and 3D times increased 10 and 15 times respectively from r2020b update 2 running on 11.0 to r2020b update 3 on 11.1!

[Chuck Cooper]

Is 2020b Update 3 available to all Big Sur Mac users with MATLAB maintenance, or only as a beta release?

[Walter Roberson]

It is available to everyone who is running R2020b. You should see a yellow bell near the upper right of the command window that you can click to upgrade. Or under the Help menu you can ask to check for updates.

[Walter Roberson]

Help -> Check for Updates .

The Add-On Manager will come up and list R2020b Release 3 and give you a chance to click Update. A MathWorks Update Installer will come up that has a Continue button; at that point, save any files you need and quit MATLAB (leaving the Installer open.) Then click Continue in the installer.

[Chuck Cooper]

Thanks to Walter Roberson! But when I tried installing 2020b Update 3 today, I got a message or error about not being authorized to do it. Update 3 was listed as the thing you'd get today when you download the MATLAB 2020b. (I guess that's new?) So I was not starting with a version of 2020b, as Roberson assumed. Anyhow, I chatted with Mathworks support. They are having problems with this M1 stuff and at their request I sent them a log dump of what happens when I tried to click on the "InstallMatlabForBlahBlah" item in a little window. BTW, the Mathworks tech says Roberson is amazing! But they have to vet stuff themselves.

Support said to check back in several days or a week. Boo... I suggested that perhaps as a workaround they could provide some way for a user to download 2020b update TWO and then update that to 3 as Roberson said. Mathworks said he would pass that suggestion up the chain.

[Walter Roberson]

Ah, sorry, I thought you already had Update 2.

[Chuck Cooper]

Yeah, I refrained from trying to install 2020b update 2 a few weeks ago because I thought it might cause problems later... Heh-heh. But thanks so much for your tip.

[Chuck Cooper]

SUCCESS: I did the stuff described earlier (December 4) by Ethan Woo in this thread and it worked. That included installing Rosetta (perhaps since I had never loaded any version of 2020b), and right-clicking on the package contents, etc., as described by Woo. I didn't have the problem he mentioned with the var file. It's also possible that the very simple solution suggested above by Annie Leonhart on December 8 would have worked. One other thing I did was to update Big Sur from what my Mac mini M1 shipped with a few weeks to the latest version (11.1) as of today, December 18.

[Amit Singh]

Benchmark for 2020b update 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGLcRF12fWU

2D and 3D scores have improved.

[Mattia Busana]

Does someone have problems with the interface? On my MB Pro M1 everything works fine, except the UI (for example Save and Open button) that is extremely laggish, I need to click 3-4 times to activate the button.

[Tommy Wilson]

For what it's worth, I'm running the new M1 chip on a 2021 MBP (Big Sur 11.6) and was also experiencing a lot of lag.

The JVM that shipped with the R2021a in my distribution was Oracle 1.8. I changed it to run on AdoptOpenJDK-8 precompiled binaries, and the lag seems to be much improved so far. See instructions on installing AdoptOpenJDK-8 via Brew here and changing/identifying Matlab's JVM here.

Note also the deprecation of:

>> brew cask install adoptopenjdk8

Which is now:

>> brew install --cask adoptopenjdk8

Hope that helps someone!

Answer 4

[Saurabh Vyas]

I feel MATLAB Online is the way to go till we get the version built to run on Apple silicon. It's got almost everything students require and can be run on safari/chrome without an install. It also has Simulink support!!

MATLAB online

[Ji Eun Lim]

Is MATLAB online as good as the app?

[Walter Roberson]

Is MATLAB online as good as the app?

Is a Pick-Up Truck as good as a Jaguar ? Maybe not, but a Pick-Up truck is good enough for a lot of things.

[leu ryan]

But it's not useful if the data is very big to process

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB Online is not intended as a heavy duty computing facility. It might perhaps be closer to Tuk Tuk than Jaguar. But in some cases, Tuk Tuk can be very useful to have around.

Answer 5

[Ongun Palaoglu]

I am using mac mini m1, it was very good. right now it is very slow, clicking on function takes a delay. i dont understand why

[Robert Hulsey]

It takes a while because until they make full ARM support with Matlab your mac has to run an additional program (Rosetta) to translate all of the commands that Matlab gives so the computer can understand them.

[Shubam Tandel]

it just stops when i try to run any code, and always have to restart matlab.

Answer 6

[Stanislas Grare]

Matlab 2021b on macbook m1 Air 256/16

Answer 7

[Jan van der Horst]

Anyone able to benchmark the new macbook M1 Pro\Max yet?

[Jan Valis]

Given it’s price, I’d actually love to see how it runs in the base (8 CPU, 16 GB RAM) configuration.

[Greg]

[Greg]

[Greg]

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro18,3

Chip: Apple M1 Pro

Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency)

Memory: 16 GB

[Zimin Lu]

I'm waiting for it too, because I find that it is a little bit slower than the macbook air (m1).

[Noel Bartlow]

I would love to see benchmark numbers for the new m1 Max if anyone has it. I have a 2019 i7 15" MBP and I get benchmark numbers above 40. Worried I'll be giving up speed if I get a new MBP.

Answer 8

[milad karimshoushtari]

Matlab 2021b benchmarks; Left side MacBook Pro 16 inch 2019 6-core i7, and right side MacBook Pro with M1 pro 8 core.

The performance in very similar on both machines. I tried running a lot of scripts and simulink models but the performance difference was negligible.

In my opinion, matlab performance has not been improved much over the last couple of years and a natively and "Fully" supported version of matlab for apple silicon is very much necessery. And by "Fully" I mean gpu support and many toolboxes that could be supported for macos but they are only available for windows.

[Antony Ware]

Your 14" M1 Pro performance looks identical to what I'm getting on my 13" M1 MBP. And I agree very much with your opinion on what is required from Mathworks.

[Walter Roberson]

GPU support is not going to happen any time soon.

Mathworks does not write their own GPU compiler tool chain. Mathworks also does not write their own scientific math GPU library equivalent of MKL or LAPACK. Apple would have to provide those libraries and those tools.

NVIDIA invests in building these kinds of tools and in optimizing them for different architectures and models, and in providing mechanisms to optimize older versions for newer models. The mechanisms do sometimes have bugs, but when they work are able to take (for example) a Turing binary and automatically rebuild it for Ampere. These mechanisms make it practical for Mathworks to provide a single GPU implementation and have it work on a wide variety of user hardware.

Does Apple have a similar mechanism, or does Apple intend to freeze the capabilities and only add more/faster resources, or will Mathworks need to provide different GPU binaries for each different M1 capacity?

[Walter Roberson]

Next question: how fast is the Apple M1 GPU compared to the Nvidia GPUs? Mathworks' tests say that the original M1 gpu corresponds to several generations back compared to the available Nvidia models. Mathworks wonders whether anyone serious about Deep Learning would buy the M1, since much higher performance is available through Nvidia cards.

Is there even any reason to believe that STEM work is part of Apple's target market, such that they would optimize for training Deep Learning, or for execution of code heavy on linear algebra or fft? Apple advertises Video editing as the key highlight... which is a different market entirely.

[milad karimshoushtari]

I totaly agree with you about the implementations, libraries and apple's target beeing video editing.

However, I wanted to mention the M1 GPU is apple's first attempt to compete with Nvidia and in terms of performance it crushes my desktop RTX 2060 without even turining on the fans!. which is really impressive.

I think we can agree that with the current pace of apple, in a couple of years there would'nt be anyting even close to their performance in terms of both CPU and GPU.

Another thing to consider is the Neural Engine of M1, I am not sure about this but maybe Deep Learnng toolbox could also benefit from it!.

All I am saying is that Mathworks should invest more on this platform because it has the potential to become the fastest tool for engineers.

[Walter Roberson]

https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine

"Unfortunately Apple isn't giving third-party developers any guidance on how to optimize their models to take advantage of the ANE. It's mostly a process of trial-and-error to figure out what works and what doesn't."

That is a long way from Nvidia's company support for scientific computing.

Mathworks is not in the business of inventing new ways to specialize in third-party hardware that does not have a decent ecosystem. Mathworks is not in the business of doing cutting-edge AI or Deep Learning research. Mathworks is in the business of using existing third-party infrastructure to take AI and Deep Learning techniques that have matured a bit, and make the techniques easier to use for non-specialists.

Mathworks does not invest much in speculation of the "If you build it, they will come" variety. It is not going to get into the ANE ecosystem until it has reason to believe that the effort would pay off in eventual sales (either direct for that product and platform, or in terms of fame that drives sales for other Mathworks products or platforms)

Mathworks is a business. It does not generally do cool things just because they are cool: it makes market predictions and works towards them. For it to get into Deep Learning on the M1 series, it would have to be convinced that the money will be worth it.

I read a paper about the realities of the Deep Learning market, talking about why there is not more diversity of hardware. The paper said that the great majority of Deep Learning research and development is being done on NVIDIA board. The paper said that the strongest competitor to NVIDIA is IBM's deep learning hardware, and that there is some interesting work being done on that. If I recall correctly, those two together had roughly 95% of the deep learning market. AMD had about 4%, and everything else put together had about 1%.

Thus, if the goal were to support an additional ecosystem for those development deep learning research, then it would make much more sense for Mathworks to support IBM's hardware next, and to sit and wait to see whether Apple's hardware gets significant attention from researchers.

Apple's ecosystem is not compatible with anyone else's. It is not based upon any kind of open standard: it is based upon their proprietary "Metal" API, which is not an extension or easy conversion from OpenGL or OpenCL or any other standard. Apple has already dropped OpenGL support.

What I wonder is why Mathworks hasn't given up on Apple entirely, since Apple is deliberately burning bridges.

[Jan van der Horst]

I understand walter's point, however there is more to consider in my opinion.

The fact is that the whole apple system will convert to M1 and in the long run Rosetta will no longer be included with macOS. So eventually it is a choice to keep supporting Apple or not. I guess you yourself know the perentage of macos users currently. But also indirectly, Apple initializes a shift towards another CPU architecture and low power computing. Good chance a large part of the industry and or the academic communitywill shift to that type of hardware. More efficient computing will be driver in the near future given the current environmental issues. Windows made builds for ARM to anticipate and also intel will make arm processors.

If Matlab would stay behind, I'd say there is alternatives with huge following: in python+numpy, wich already has M1 support. If matlab stays behind it will lose to this alternative.

With regards to GPU and special toolbox\learning support. I'd say, take it a step at a time. The toolboxes to run Cuda kernels and work with GPU arrays seems quite easy transfrom to support metal compute shaders. (You can access the Apple GPU through objective C, which compiles through mex + and a small adjustment to the matlab mex preferences). Why not make something and let the community take it from there. 20 % effort 80 % result. This all of course after compiling the normal Matalb base for M1.

[Rik]

A native version is in development and for the forseeable future Rosetta 2 will be included. I haven't heard any rumours about it being removed. Only at such a point would there be a true need for an ARM version of Matlab.

Python+CUDA is already synonymous with deep learning and AI (at least the research part). Despite that, Matlab is still around. I doubt the technical implementation detail of whether it runs through Rosetta or not should matter to anyone. As long as the performance is there.

Answer 9

[Annie Leonhart]

All you need to do to make it work is go to "show package content" Matlab/xxxx/bin/maci64/matlabwindow.app that's pretty much it. Click that and it'll run. Nothing special you need to do. Create an alias on your dock.

Been using 2020b for weeks with 0 issues. Runs just as good as it does on PC. Fully functional.

[AKASH PERUMALLA]

Can you please say how to install MATLAB Latest in new MacBook Air m1 It is asking for InstallForMacOSX.app Please help I'm new to mac OS

[Konstantin Yem]

I did the same steps, the matlab window appears and then closes down with that message bellow.

Could you please help what this might be ?

Last login: Fri Mar 12 20:22:04 on ttys000

@-MacBook-Pro ~ % /Applications/MATLAB_R2020b.app/bin/maci64/MATLABWindow.app/Contents/MacOS/MATLABWindow ; exit;

Cannot locate or initialize class com/mathworks/jmi/OpaqueJavaInterface.

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/mathworks/jmi/OpaqueJavaInterface

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mathworks.jmi.OpaqueJavaInterface

at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:382)

at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)

at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:349)

at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)

Saving session...

...copying shared history...

...saving history...truncating history files...

...completed.

[Process completed]

Answer 10

[FP Am]

For anyone interested:

Macbook Air M1, 8 GB RAM. Pretty zippy!

This is run through terminal+Atom, MATLAB Version: 9.9.0.1570001 (R2020b) Update 4

[Fab Cor]

Would you mind sharing the link from where I can download the latest update of MATLAB for Apple M1?

[Walter Roberson]

R2020b Update 3 or later runs on Apple M1 under Rosetta2; not all parts of it work yet. Polyspace in particular is not available for M1 yet.

[Jan Valis]

Thanks for this benchmark.

Using a 2016 MBP with i5@2.9 GHz and 8 GB of RAM, I'd "kill" for such performace. Espetially for that price.

I'm wondering which version of MBA do you have. The 7-, or the 8-core one?

Thanks in advance

Jan

[Walter Roberson]

datapoint:

My 2013 iMac (intel, 4 cores) is pretty much the same speed as FP Am shows.

[Walter Roberson]

For laughs, I ran R2021a for Windows inside a virtual machine hosted on my 2013 iMac. The performance ratio was about 20. (Graphics for that configuration have to be done in software rather than with hardware assistance.)

Answer 11

[Pieter Durman]

I have just bought a new MacBook pro M1 2020. I mosly use the Deep learning toolbox and Global Optimisation toolbox for university work. It has worked very well so far.

[LeChat]

Thank you for your feedback. What happens when you run:

gpuDevice

Can you use gpuArrays?

[Walter Roberson]

Unlikely, as the M1 do not use Nvidia GPUs.

[Alessandro Di Donna]

Thanks, I have the MacBook Pro 2020 and MATLAB doesn't open if the "global optimization toolbox" is not added.

Answer 12

[Kumar Yashasvi]

yes, the newer version of matlab will surely support

Answer 13

[master TOM]

Will MATLAB R2021a run natively on Apple sillicon?

[Walter Roberson]

Mathworks has not announced one way or another.

However, if you have Software Maintenance Service then you could install R2021a pre-release under Non-disclosure Agreement and see what the release notes say.

[Steven Lord]

The System Requirements page for release R2021a for Mac does include a note discussing Apple Silicon.

Answer 14

[cr]

I cannot believe the results (below) I'm seeing on my MBP-M1 with R2019b. R2018a showed slower benchmarks as expected for Matlab running with Rosetta especially on graphics front. But strangely R2019b is zipping fast.

Results on R2019b, connected to power and no peripherals.

Out of curiosity, I connected an external monitor whose resolution is only somewhat lower than MBPs (2560x1080) and re-ran bench. Graphics seemed way faster, like running Matlab on Intel. The results are incredible.

Results on external monitor:

[Walter Roberson]

Thanks for the benchmarks, cr !

[cr]

Walter,

Any thoughts on the performance jump from 2018a to 2019b?

Thanks.

[Bruno Luong]

IIRC you can't easily compare bench between versions.

The algo itself change, the bench tests change, then reference machine change.

[Walter Roberson]

True, when you look at the release notes, every few releases it will take note that bench() has been revised. Mostly it is revised to make it "harder", which makes it less sensitive to timing noise as hardware gets fast enough that small differences in short completion times could bias the computations badly.

[Mattia Busana]

Any report from 2020b?

[Bruno Luong]

Already reported. None with update 3 though.

Answer 15

[Gal Barkai]

Just got MBP with the M1, there are "straight out of the box" benchmarks for 2020b through Rosetta 2:

The grahics scores are REALLY bad right now, but the rest are decent. Hopefully it will improve soon

Answer 16

[cr]

UPDATE 1: Text comparison tool in R2019b not working on M1 mac. Got the following error popup.

[Colin Fraser]

If you are still experiencing this issue, please create a service request below.

https://www.mathworks.com/support/contact_us.html

-Colin Fraser

[cr]

Yes, the issue still exists. But since MW has already said versions prior to 2020b, update3 are not supported, there is no point opening a ticket.

Answer 17

[Petar Apostolov]

Well i got this and i am pleased with that. I know it will get with the next updates even faster. And for that price range... I have the Mac Mini with 16 gb and 512 ssd. But strange how fast 2019 is.

[cr]

Is this 2020b with update 3?

Answer 18

[Shubam Tandel]

it runs well on my mac mini, but whenever i try to run any code it just stops responding and have to restart the matlab file all the time.

Answer 19

[Federico Albi]

Hi everyone,probably is a silly question but do all toolboxes work on Apple M1? At least through Rosetta, like the main version of Matlab... By the way, I should use Simulink, Communication Toolbox, Antenna Toolbox, Image Processing Toolbox and Optimization Toolbox. Thanks for your attention.

Answer 20

[cr]

Depends on version. MW has said 2020b v3 and later will work on M1 through Rosetta. There might still be issues to iron out. Late prior versions work with some quirks. See some earlier comments in this thread.

[Federico Albi]

Thanks! I've found this... So I suppose all other toolboxes (hypothetically) work😅

Answer 21

[Travis Robinson]

It just closes anytime I try and open it and click something on my M1 air.

[Travis Robinson]

And it is the 2021a version

[Alessandro Di Donna]

You must add the Global Optimization Toolbox for it to work

[Walter Roberson]

Global Optimization Toolbox is not enough if the problem is that MATLAB closes as soon as it is opened.

[Travis Robinson]

I just deleted Matlab and re-downloaded, seems to have resolved the issue. Good old turn it off and on again solution lol. Thanks for the suggestions.