Skip to content

Announcing M4 Pro availability for Cirrus Runners

TLDR: Cirrus Runners for macOS are now powered by the latest M4 Pro chips. These latest chips have 50% better single core performance and 2.7x faster memory compared to previously used regular M2 chips. All customers have been migrated to the new infrastructure at no extra cost.

We are excited to kick 2025 with a huge announcement! Last year we had tremendous growth among enterprise customers which trusted Cirrus Runners platform and enjoyed our unique fixed pricing for unlimited usage.

Our unique pricing model, where customers pay for job concurrency rather than per-minute usage, sets us apart in the CI/CD market. This approach creates a perfect alignment of interests - as an infrastructure provider, we are naturally motivated to make your builds as fast as possible, since faster job completion means we can better utilize our hardware. This stands in contrast to traditional per-minute billing models where slower builds result in higher costs for customers.

When Apple announced their latest generation of M4 Pro chips last November, we saw an opportunity to significantly upgrade our infrastructure. Thanks to the long-term partnerships with our enterprise customers, we were able to make a substantial investment as a bootstrapped company. This investment allowed us to completely replace our existing M2 infrastructure with M4 Pro chips, setting us up for exceptional performance over the next two years.

Mini M4 Pro

Performance Improvements

The migration to M4 Pro chips brings performance improvements across all workloads:

  • 30% faster single-core performance
  • 2.7x faster memory bandwidth
  • base runner now also has 16GB instead of 12GB

These improvements translate directly into faster build and test execution times. Our initial benchmarks show that typical iOS builds are completing 30-40% faster on the new infrastructure. Comparing to the GitHub's managed macos-latest runner that still use non-Pro M1 chips, Cirrus Runners now are twice as fast! This 2x performance improvement makes the switch to Cirrus Runners even more compelling, especially considering our fixed pricing model.

These improvements are already making a real difference for our customers. As one customer reported after the migration:

I just checked, and the build times improved by around 30%. That's amazing!

Seamless Migration

All existing customers have been automatically migrated to the new M4 Pro infrastructure. The migration was performed gradually over the past weeks with zero downtime. The best part? There's no price increase – we maintain our commitment to a fixed $150 monthly rate per runner regardless of minutes usage.

What's Next

While this upgrade significantly improves performance for all macOS workloads, we're not stopping here. We're already working on:

  • New optimizations for macOS infrastructure unlocked by the Pro chips
  • Even better startup types for all kind of resource classes for macOS and all Linux runners
  • Several experiments that we are very excited about, stay tuned!

Stay tuned for more updates! In the meantime, if you haven't tried Cirrus Runners yet, now is the perfect time to start your free trial. If you have any questions about the new infrastructure or need assistance with migration, don't hesitate to reach out to our support team at support@cirruslabs.org.