External Email - Use Caution
A native silicon Mac build (darwin_arm64) from the freesurfer development branch is currently available for download (along with the usual darwin_x86_64 Intel Mac build). This means freeview and most binaries should run on current Macs with M1, M2, M3 arm64 processors without using the Rosetta emulation environment required to run Intel binaries. The build also includes Apple's tensorflow modules for arm64 python.
https://secure-web.cisco.com/19iU6Duk2zpbfifexEEBWTZjtW6_df80in56MrW1gz_nnhS...
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1XTLOzwkVakfd1RBsibgQ7t6YC509CBc7vc-fZFabprKBsG...
The usual caveat applies if you are contemplating switching from a previous/older freesurfer build or release to a different freesurfer build or release compiled for a different architecture/platform. We provide this advice at the bottom of the Freesurfer 7.X release page, https://secure-web.cisco.com/1AR0zDCFfQrz2YrY4j9dkUT8euQVsY4AHiC6ltxf0tEGe5u...
Important Note: When processing a group of subjects for your study, it is essential to process all your subjects with the same version of FreeSurfer, on the same OS platform and vendor, and for safety, even the same version of the OS. While we continue to work to ensure that results match across platforms, there are none-the-less system-level libraries that are OS dependent. An exception to this rule is that you may view and edit files across any platform or version, and run some post-processing tools (outside the recon-all stream) if you check with us first (for instance you may run the longitudinal processing with newer versions).
As of this writing, development builds are post the 7.4.1 release from June 2023. We don't encourage use of dev builds instead of a previous release unless the dev build contains a bug fix or new functionality you need, i.e., dev builds are not expected to be as stable as releases. That being said, please let us know if you run into issues when trying the new build. We have not compared the performance of the arm64 binaries against the Intel binaries.
- R.