FME Desktop 2023 on MacBook M1 Pro (Apple Silicon) Benchmark

Back in December 2020 when I first got my hands on a MacBook with the new M1 Apple Silicon chips I ran some benchmarks. FME Desktop 2020 ran fairly well under Rosetta, but obviously did not show the full potential of the M1.

Recently Safe released an Apple Silicon native version of FME Desktop 2023 and I decided to run the benchmarks again.

I had to modify the benchmark slightly as the Mac Apple Silicon version does not support File Geodatabases currently. Instead I use FMEs native FFS format for readers and writers. Other than that - the benchmark is identical to the one I ran in 2020. A simple point on area overlay that I run twice:

• 2.7M points and 1.9M polygons
• 4.8M points and 2.4M polygons

The benchmarks were run on the following hardware:

• MacBook M1 Pro 16 2021 with 32 GB RAM/MacOS 13 Ventura
• Dell Precision 5530 Core i7-8550H/32 GB RAM/Windows 10

Benchmark time results

	2.7M points and 1.9M polygons	4.8M points and 2.4M polygons
FME 2021, MacOS Rosetta	02:46	04:19
FME 2023, MacOS ARM native	00:47	01:16
FME 2021, Windows	04:24	04:49
FME 2023, Windows	02:37	04:34

The Mac M1 Pro was already running FME Desktop 2021 pretty quick under Rosetta, but look at the speed difference compared to the Apple Silicon native version. It is three times faster! Granted - Safe must have done some optimizations on the transformer between 2021 and 2023 (as you can see - FME 2023 on Windows is much faster than the 2021 version), but still.

Peak memory usage (Kb)

	2.7M points and 1.9M polygons	4.8M points and 2.4M polygons
FME 2021, MacOS Rosetta	2 708 812	3 615 104
FME 2023, MacOS ARM native	1 971 392	2 620 864
FME 2021, Windows	2 526 668	3 364 744
FME 2023, Windows	1 891 032	2 537 420

It seems the previous issue with excessive memory usage when running FME Desktop on MacOs have been taken care of. Both the Rosetta version and the Apple Silicon version use pretty much excactly the same amount of memory as the Windows version.