Preparing for Apple's new computers
Sam Lemonick · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2020
Two weeks ago, Apple announced a new line of Mac computers that will be the first to run on its M1 processor chips. The company promises the new machines will be faster and more powerful than their predecessors, but for Mac-using chemists, the shift conjures visions of software crashes as older software struggles to run on the new chips. Computational chemists and computer scientists have been building fixes they hope will ensure software runs smoothly, but one expert says he’s still going to wait before upgrading his machine. Chips like the M1 execute the instructions written into computer programs, whether for word processing, web processing, or molecular dynamics simulations. Apple has used Intel chips in Macs since 2006. Computational chemist François-Xavier Coudert compares the transition to changing languages: the new chips simply won’t understand the old instructions. Coudert, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a