How many parallel jobs are supported by the Apple M1 chip?

I do a lot of parallel processing. In other words, I often define a function to do my work (such as apply part-of-speech tagging to a file), break my processing into lists (a number of files), and submit each item to each of my CPUs ("cores"). My current Macintosh has eight cores, and thus, I can process as many as eight files in parallel. If I have two hundred files to process, parallel processing speeds things up significantly, as much as 200/8 times faster.

The newer Macintosh computers, with Apple M1 chips, have as many as sixteen cores. Some of them are generic, some of them are GPU's, and some of them are "performance" cores (whatever that means).

If I apply my parallel processing technique on one of these newer Macintoshes, will I have as many as sixteen process going at one time? I think not because my (Python) scripts will need to be interpreted for different core architectures, and my operating system won't know to what cores to send the jobs. On the other hand, it would be pretty cool to be able to process against sixteen cores instead of just eight.

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Eric Lease Morgan
Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship
Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame

574/631-8604
https://cds.library.nd.edu