Metal backend support?

[BlackRockJL]

Hey, awesome work!
Are there plans to add a Metal backend support for Apple silicon? :)
An update for VkFFT was recently released enabling Metal backends from their side.

[vincefn]

In principle it could be done - not sure how much work that would represent.

However the biggest pre-requisite is a python metal library sufficiently established and maintained (like pycuda/cupy for cuda, pyopencl for OpenCL) so that it is worth the effort.

There's https://github.com/baldand/py-metal-compute but no update in 2 years, and https://github.com/metal-stack/metal-python.

[tdgrant1]

+1 for this feature

[isuruf]

You can use the OpenCL backend to access the GPU on Apple silicon.

Running the example, you get,

Selected device:  Apple M1 Max
( 800  768   16)[2D] dt=  3.79 ms  154.55 Gbytes/s  [norm=0]

[BlackRockJL]

Oh amazing! I did not know that OpenCL is still a thing for mac since apple claimed it’s deprecated. So you just selected the OpenCL backend and it runs natively (without Rosetta)?
Thank you! :)

I found a discussion about OpenCL and macOS if someone is interested in some other background.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/694866

[isuruf]

So you just selected the OpenCL backend and it runs natively (without Rosetta)?

Yes. On Apple Silicon, the OpenCL CPU backend is gone and only the OpenCL Metal backend is available.

[vincefn]

And it's well-tested, see on an M1 mac mini:
http://ftp.esrf.fr/pub/scisoft/PyNX/pyvkfft-test/pyvkfft-test-2023-07-31-apple-m1/pyvkfft-test.html