Thanks to my friend and fellow forum member Eric Bolden, I had my first chance to try out Panorama X on a real M1 Mac earlier this evening (the machine was a couple thousand miles away from me, but that’s not much of an obstacle these days). Both the current version of Panorama X (10.1) and the beta version (10.2) appear to run exactly the same as they do on an Intel based computer with Big Sur. I even installed Panorama X Server and that worked smoothly as well. (By the way, the machine was the entry level M1 Mac Mini with 8Gb of RAM.)
Using the Database Exchange (in the Help menu), I downloaded the US Airports database, which has about 20 thousand records, and I was able to run some timing tests. I ran the same tests on my 2.9 Ghz Intel i7 Macbook Pro (16"). Keep in mind that these are comparisons between a $700 computer and a multi-thousand dollar computer, and that Panorama X is not yet native on the M1, so it was running thru Apples Rosetta translation software. In spite of that, the M1 was faster in 3 out of 4 tests! In fact, up to 50% faster!
- The M1 performed text based selection about 20% faster than the i7.
- The M1 performed numeric selection about 50% faster than the i7.
- The M1 sorted by a text field about 10% faster than the i7.
- The i7 sorted by a numeric field about 20% faster than the M1.
Note that none of the differences were noticeable to the naked eye, the differences were in tens of milliseconds on this 20k record database. To isolate processor speed vs. other factors, all the tests were performed with the noshow statement so that display speed wasn’t tested – including the display time approximately doubled all the times (in other words, the processor only used half of the actual elapsed time, even with this fairly large database). To the naked eye, Panorama performed about the same on these two machines, which is pretty amazing considering that one machine is 4 times the price of the other – and also considering that Panorama is only going to get faster when a native version is available in the spring.
A year from now, when there will be M2 Macs (or whatever they call them) and a native version of Panorama X, the speeds are going to be really incredible. But even right now it appears that Panorama X is ready to go on these new machines.
