Sovereign Computing on Apple Silicon: Benchmarking Metal GPU Compute vs NVIDIA CUDA for HPC Workloads

Evaluates Apple Silicon (M4 Ultra) as a sovereign alternative to NVIDIA CUDA for GPU-accelerated HPC. Through analysis of the OpenFPM Metal pipeline and projected benchmarks across N-body, SPH, FFT, and sparse matrix workloads, finds Apple Silicon excels in memory-bound simulations exceeding 48GB but achieves 20-50% of equivalent CUDA performance for compute-bound workloads.