Running Fusion with Rosetta 2 on Apple ARM-based M1 Chipsets

[keqingsong]

July 5, 2023 Update 

Hello all, the current Insider Build of Fusion now has native Apple Silicon support, and as you read some of the latest comments in this thread, the results are looking great. Our goal is make it available to everyone by our next product update, which should be happening towards the end of the month. If you want to try it now, you can sign up to join our Insider Program, and get access to the Insider Build. Keep in mind that once you become a member, you are under NDA and cannot sharing information publicly, with the exception of this particular project since it is already public knowledge. 

Click this link to sign-up and join: https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/fusion-360/insider-program

Thank you to those you have who've expressed interested and have been testing it! Please continue to let us know about your experiences. 
___

November 23, 2022 Update

As you know we have been working closely with Apple on native support for Fusion on Apple Silicon Chipsets (i.e. M1 & M2). We are pleased to announce that we expect to achieve full native support by Summer of 2023.

As we have explained in this thread, the delay is a result of the need to ensure 100% compatibility between components from over 100 3rd party vendors including Autodesk.

If you want to access this functionality as soon as possible, please consider joining the Insider Program. If you have any questions on the topic please contact @Rajkumar.ilanchelian.

October 28, 2021 Update

Hey all, thanks again for the passionate discussion here. Even though we haven't chimed into this thread as much as we wanted, we are reading every single response and are actively working on getting Fusion to be natively supported on the new Apple chipset. Here's what I know from talking to the development teams: 
We are actively working on getting native support. This is still going to take some time because Fusion uses a multitude of services to work the way it does (Autodesk-owned as well as 3rd party) many of which are also not natively supported on M1 chipsets yet. We are collaborating closely with those teams to taking the necessary steps to ensure that the services we use are also natively supported. There is a lot of passion internally to get this done as well, so we definitely feel you. Again, I can't not say when this will happen, but as soon as we have something more concrete to share, we'll be sure to update you all. 

April 29, 2021 Update

We've been actively working on resolving the issues mentioned below and are glad to report that these issues no longer exist when running Fusion on the M1 chipset. We are also working closely with Apple and are in the process of certifying Fusion as 100% compatible running on M1 chipsets via Rosetta 2. 

In terms of running Fusion natively on the M1 chipset without Rosetta 2, we are still working towards this goal but is going to take some time to reach. We are confident to say that running Fusion on the M1 chipset via Rosetta 2 should be indistinguishable from running it on an Intel-based chipset, if not faster. 

If there are specific issues you've experience and are not mentioned below (strike-through items), please chime in and respond to this thread so we are aware and can look into it ASAP. Thank you for your continued support! 

___

Apple's original press release 

We are delighted to see Fusion being featured in the most recent Apple ARM-based M1 Macbook Pro announcement. Although Fusion isn’t natively compatible on Apple’s new M1 chipset architecture yet, Rosetta 2 should enable you to run Fusion*. We will be sure to keep you posted on our progress towards support of Apple’s new line of chipsets.   

-  
   
* While much of Fusion 360 works as expected under Rosetta 2, we discovered that some Fusion 360 components were not yet compatible. If you run Fusion 360 using Rosetta 2, you may experience issues in these areas:  

·         Switching Team Hubs in the Data Panel  

·         Insert from McMaster-Carr  

·         Explore Generative Design and Electronics Cooling Simulation results  

·         ECAD Tool Libraries and Content Manager  

·         Local Simulation Solves utilizing NASTRAN  

If you rely on the impacted areas for your work, we recommend you to stay on Intel-based Macs until we have these issues sorted out.   

[keqingsong]

@oyvindTMNSU I'm running Fusion 360 on my 2020 13" Macbook Pro with Apple M1 chip and it runs just fine without issues.

[lance.carocci]

@oyvindTMNSU at this time, I wouldn't stop you from making that purchase. While Fusion 360 could still be better optimized for Apple silicon, the Rosetta 2 experience is largely indistinguishable from native Intel. If you encounter any commands taking longer (e.g., we know Rip Up for Electronics is a bit slower), please let us know.

[oyvindTMNSU]

Great to hear!:)

[oyvindTMNSU]

Ok, thanks for answering! 🙂

looking forward to future updates of fusion 360! Really like that software! 🙂 

[amcallister]

@keqingsong I appreciate your time on this forum, but I don't understand the utility of saying "It works fine" until you folks discover something that doesn't work, that is. The official stance of Autodesk is that "It's partially supported". So, given that, it's a bit irresponsible to suggest users buy laptops so that they can beta-test your product for no compensation for something that you might be working very hard at, and might be on it's way to being finished, but that you know is unfinished. I appreciate the more measured response of @lance.carocci and certainly I'll direct my stakeholder community to forward concerns to you.

I'm in the position of trying to advise students who are laying down thousands of dollars of their own money on laptops for their learning, and what's been clear in this forum is that there is no published timeline, and there are users on this forum, and on YouTube who are like "this does not work as expected". And, you didn't respond to my earlier post, but you're now responding to another user indicating "sure, go ahead". If you're going to suggest that people buy Apple Silicon machines I would suggest that you actually provide a real roadmap with quarterly projections as to when you plan to have support and set some expectations with your user community.

[lance.carocci]

@amcallister if it meant creating a larger mess for users, their IT departments, and our support team, I would not have recommended running Fusion 360 on Rosetta 2 while Intel Macs remain available to purchase. Our initial post was based on testing available with Developer Transition Kits, and we were since able to confirm compatibility with M1-based production devices.

Apple silicon is here to stay, and we're committed to macOS. The transition from x86 to ARM is not a trivial process, which is why Rosetta 2 exists in the first place - for you as users to mitigate the adoption of a new technology, and for for us as developers to take the time to do things proper.

That said, first generation products are not without risk, and we would rather afford users the flexibility to decide for themselves whether it's worth it based on their needs, budget, expected length of device ownership, and any other factors of importance to you.

I didn't see your other post, so let me try to address it now:

what is the timeline for:

• Full support of Fusion 360 on Rosetta 2
• Availability of a Universal Binary for Fusion 360

We're planning for Fall 2021, and we want to advise Industrial Design students on purchasing appropriate hardware. At this point, I would be reluctant to advise incoming students to purchase an Apple M1 based laptop based on comments in this thread. 

---

That is a fair assessment - if your priority is stability and reliability, I would say x64 is still the way to go for a few years. Apple is still selling Intel-based Macs - it's difficult to say if this will still be an option after their usual end-of-summer announcements, but any new device sold before then is still going to have to be supported for its full warrantied term, and x64 Big Sur will still likely be usable for a few years beyond that. If you are seeking purchase advice for a mass deployment, be it enterprise or education, I am always going to err on the side of caution.

But many of our users were already committed to buying M1-based devices to replace aging hardware stuck on 10.12 and 10.13, or are simply willing to test the waters - I want to at least give them the peace of mind that Fusion won't implode on startup. If one of your students decided to buy an M1-based device anyway, they could very well use Fusion 360 without issue, depending on their workflows. But the fact remains that the platform is new, and still curing - issues are bound to appear, inside and out of Fusion 360.

[amcallister]

Lance, @lance.carocci 

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to respond in detail. This is very helpful and I appreciate the detail in here. Lots to think about, and thanks for Autodesk's on-going support for education.

Andrew.

[jarekrzak]

Hi! I was curious if it will be possible to run Fusion on the M1 equipped iPad or iPad Pro?

[lance.carocci]

@jarekrzak,

Probably not at least not until we have a universal binary with native M1 support.

I am unclear if the new iOS devices support Rosetta 2, but if they did then presumably it wouldn't be much different from what's possible on M1 Macbooks currently, though we are not likely to support this configuration out of the gate until we've had a chance to test it.

[JaumeMartinez]

Hi  @lance.carocci , 

 Do you know if some of the non functional commands described by Keqin at the first post are fixed?

·         Switching Team Hubs in the Data Panel  

·         Insert from McMaster-Carr  

·         Explore Generative Design and Electronics Cooling Simulation results  

·         ECAD Tool Libraries and Content Manager  

·         Local Simulation Solves utilizing NASTRAN 

Kind Regards .

[keqingsong]

April 29, 2021 Update

We've been actively working on resolving the issues mentioned below and are glad to report that these issues no longer exist when running Fusion 360 on the M1 chipset. We are also working closely with Apple and are in the process of certifying Fusion 360 as 100% compatible running on M1 chipsets via Rosetta 2. 

In terms of running Fusion 360 natively on the M1 chipset without Rosetta 2, we are still working towards this goal but is going to take some time to reach. We are confident to say that running Fusion 360 on the M1 chipset via Rosetta 2 should be indistinguishable from running it on an Intel-based chipset, if not faster. 

If there are specific issues you've experience and are not mentioned below (strike-through items), please chime in and respond to this thread so we are aware and can look into it ASAP. Thank you for your continued support! 

[mnt_goat_76]

Great to hear.

Does (or will) Fusion make use of multiple cores when generating tool paths?

Toolpath generation is my biggest pin point, with some taking several hours to complete for complex 3D models.

I am hoping Apple’s aggressive plan to expand the cores up to 128 may cut the generation time down significantly, but we won’t see any real improvement (possibly even seeing things get worse) if generation only uses a single core.

[Anonymous]

Any more updates on your experience with 8gb of RAM, I am trying to decided if I need to pony up for the 16gb. 

[jeff_strater]

@mnt_goat_76 - from my understanding, a single toolpath does not use multithreading.  However, I believe you can generate multiple toolpaths at the same time, and that does use multiple threads.  Not sure if that answers your question or not.

[HughesTooling]

Toolpaths are multithreaded now. Here you can see all cores used to calculate an adaptive OP. I have noticed linking on a complex part is not multithreaded, my guess would be the traveling salesman algorithm is not something you can multithread. So you might find if you generate an OP it will use all cores while calculating the actual cut paths but then take a long time on a single thread joining all the toolpaths. Now that said, I don't know if the M1 emulation is multithreaded though.

[mnt_goat_76]

Thanks for that reply. 

would it be normal for a detailed 3D milling toolpath to take make hours to generate with a reasonably well equipped intel PC? (I open to the possibility, however remote, that the problem may be the user and not the software) 🙂

As an example, I was milling a 3D model of a mountain from digital elevation data. I did have the step down pretty small to get a lot of detail, but it still didn’t seem like it should take many hours to calculate.

(I know, many, many variables here... just curious if this is common or plausible) 😉

[HughesTooling]

@mnt_goat_76  Start a thread in the manufacture forum with some pictures and if possible share the design. Personally I'd keep the roughing stepdown course and use 3d contour or scallop to finish. Adaptive toolpaths are going to take a long time to calculate if the fine stepdown is too fine. Also having the staydown level percentage too high will take a long time to solve.

Mark

[JaumeMartinez]

Thank you for your answers @keqingsong , @HughesTooling  and the rest of the users who have intervened.

Currently I have a powerful windows laptop but I need something more portable and above all not to lose power by not being plugged into the electrical current so I have decided to go for the new MacBook with M1 chip.
I will be informing in this post about my experience with it.

Thank you so much.

Best regards.

[gavin2PKYC]

This morning I find that Fusion 360 will no longer run on my Mac mini M1. Crash report below. The error also occurs when running a freshly downloaded installer. That's me without access to the software! Any help appreciated.

Report:

Process: sh [3350]
Path: /Users/USER/*/Autodesk Fusion 360.app/Contents/MacOS/Autodesk Fusion 360
Identifier: com.autodesk.dls.streamer.scriptapp.Autodesk-Fusion-360
Version: ???
Code Type: X86-64 (Translated)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: sh [3350]
User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2021-05-13 10:43:55.991 +0100
OS Version: macOS 11.2.3 (20D91)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: 3B4D7A05-0BDB-7E79-9F04-BBD4867CB7CA

Time Awake Since Boot: 3100 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason: DYLD, [0x1] Library missing

Application Specific Information:
dyld: launch, loading dependent libraries

Dyld Error Message:
dyld cache load error: syscall to map cache into shared region failed
Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
Referenced from: /bin/sh
Reason: image not found

Binary Images:
0x10023a000 - 0x10023dfff + (11) <4BE24D50-2ECC-3555-AC98-E1A2FE0E7371>
0x200567000 - 0x200602fff dyld (832.7.3) <0D4EA85F-7E30-338B-9215-314A5A5539B6> /usr/lib/dyld
0x7ffdffdf3000 - 0x7ffdffe66fff +runtime (203.30) <C98E75A6-BDC8-3D5C-B95B-6422005E96D8> /Library/Apple/*/runtime

Model: Macmini9,1, BootROM 6723.81.1, proc 8:4:4 processors, 8 GB, SMC
Graphics: kHW_AppleM1Item, Apple M1, spdisplays_builtin
Memory Module: lp_ddr4

[vaic.inc]

Hello,

I am a proud owner of a MacBook air with an M1 processor, and I what to say that is great, with my old computer a big computation will take 20 min with m1 only 2 min (the same toolpath).

if is that good now I wonder how will be when is optimized for m1.

Best Regards,

Vlad