Steinberg says Apple Silicon ‘as much as twice as fast’ as Intel chips

Steinberg says Apple Silicon is twice as fast as Intel with its Dorico Pro software

Blink as you may have missed it, but one of the world’s leading computer music developers, Steinberg, recently shared its powerfully positive experience of developing for Apple Silicon, saying the M-series chip has unleashed significant performance gains on its software.

Twice the performance in comparison to Intel

Steinberg recently optimized its popular Dorico Pro app for Apple Silicon and unleashed an impressive 2x performance improvement in comparison to running the app on Intel processors when they did.

Dorico 4 is a music composition application that also writes the music it makes in music notation and automatically produces printed music scores. It’s an incredibly useful creative app that’s widely used among musicians. The app works seamlessly with iPads.

In a press release, Steinberg talked up the improvements it has found in Apple Silicon:

“Dorico 4 is the first professional-grade music notation and composition application to run natively on Apple’s new M1-powered Macs. Some editing operations are as much as twice as fast on Apple silicon than on in Intel-powered Macs, and with the improved energy efficiency of the new system architecture, users will be making music for more hours on their MacBook Air or MacBook Pro between charges,” the company said.

A range of really useful improvements

Steinberg has improved all the Dorico family of apps, including the free Dorico for iPad and Dorico SE, through the mid-range Dorico Elements, to the flagship Dorico Pro.

The massive range of improvements include a dedicated Key Editor in Write mode, Smart Midi import, polyphonic MIDI transcription, and enhancements to the powerful Insert Mode.

The latter lets composers easily change rhythms, insert or remove music from the middle of a flow, while retaining all subsequent music. The updated app takes Insert mode to the next level, introducing an editable stop position, so that a point is specified in the flow beyond which any changes that ripple forwards from an earlier edit in Insert mode should stop.

There are plenty of additional improvements within the powerful application.

[Also read: Apple’s top brass explains how they plan silicon development]

A chorus of welcome

Steinberg’s ultra-positive accounting around the ability of Apple’s new processors is just the latest in a chorus of voices emanating from among developers of some of the world’s most demanding apps.

Adobe, for example, announced huge speed increases across its ecosystem of creative applications on Apple Silicon, and its claims have been echoed (and enhanced) again and again since.

The M-series chips have been so well received that Apple has also seen some accelerated market share enhancementssince they were introduced. Way over a million Apple Silicon Macs are already in use across enterprise IT.

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