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://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/dist/freesurfer/dev/freesurfer-macOS-darwin_arm64-dev.pkg
https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/dist/freesurfer/dev/freesurfer-macOS-darwin_arm64-dev.tar.gz
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://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/rel7downloads:
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.