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LTSpice runs slow on Apple Silicon M1

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ts125rider:
Hi folks!

I've got this new Apple Macbook Air M1 with 8 CPU, 8 GPU cores and 8GB of RAM.
I've tried to run an LTSpice simulation on this machine. The simulation took about 20 minutes to finish on a Dell XPS 13 (i5-1135G7, 8GB RAM) and about 30 minutes to finish on a desktop PC (i5-6600K, 16GB RAM).

The simulation never finished on the Macbook, because I've stopped it after 1.5 hours (around 45% completion). There was no convergence issues, since other two machines could run it perfectly fine, also the Macbook never stuck in a single timestep, however it calculated the timesteps very slowly.
I have to admit that the simulation isn't the most optimized, but it is definitely can be solved.

I'm using the latest version of the program which is ported to Apple Silicon M1, so it runs natively, however the activity monitor only about 15% processor utilization when I run the simulation. The backside of the Macbook is cold so there is no thermal throttling.

Have anybody experienced similar thing? Do you have any idea how can I increase the simulation performance?

Thanks,
Mate

JDW:
It always frustrates me to no end when people never reply to my posts.  Thousands of views of your post, but my reply is the first.  Crazy!

While I don't have an answer for you, I am experiencing a major slowdown after upgrading from MacOS High Sierra to MacOS Mojave, as I mentioned in a post today on the ADI EngineerZone forum:

https://ez.analog.com/design-tools-and-calculators/f/q-a/562293/lt-spice-unbelievably-slow-after-upgrading-macos-from-high-sierra-to-mojave

I would encourage you to post there because it's quite obvious no one here seems interested in LT Spice, which I find rather odd.  Or maybe it could be that everyone is on Windoze rather than MacOS.

3roomlab:
post a sample work which has problems, files schema models etc

JDW:
Trust me, it's not tied to my ASC files because those were the exact same simulation files I used on the exact same version of LT Spice just a day ago prior to upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave.  It's not the files.  I am searching through the LT Spice group right now to see if others have similar unexpected slowness after doing a MacOS upgrade...

https://groups.io/g/LTspice/

RoGeorge:
As a temporary workaround, I would try running the Windows version of LTspice with the help of WineHQ:
- install WineHQ for Mac https://www.winehq.org/
- download the Windows version of LTspice (not the Mac LTspice) https://ltspice.analog.com/software/LTspice64.exe and install it inside WineHQ

Please note that Wine is not a Windows simulator, Wine only translates the Windows OS calls into host OS calls (here BSD calls, because Mac is a BSD type of OS AFAIK).  I am using the same setup (Windows version of LTspice installed and run with Wine) to make use of LTspice on either Linux or FreeBSD.

Don't have a Mac, so can not test this workaround for Mac, but it might work.


Later edit:
Doh, the M1 mac is the ARM based mac, right?  If so, I don't think that workaround would work, my bad, sorry.

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