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Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

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Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#161

Post by timw4mail »

meatmanek wrote: post #96
cptskippy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they've already figured out multi-targeting in XCode and gave done this once before so I would imagine for a lot of developers it will just be a recompile. I saw a really cheap MacBook Air deal the other day and was tempted until I saw they're i3 based. Assuming App support, I could see them replace that with an ARM based CPU without anyone noticing.

They've done this 2 to 5 times before, depending on whether you count the 32-bit to 64-bit conversions and iOS. 68k->PPC, PPC->PPC64, PPC->x86, x86->x86-66, arm->arm64

I'm not sure you could say they fully transitioned from PPC to PPC64, as only the G5s were 64bit, and laptops never got the G5. I think the x86 transition would have been easier if it started out 64bit, but that's probably Intel's fault.

More practically, the transitions so far have been like this: 68k -> PPC (With full 68k emulation) -> x86 (with partial PPC emulation) -> x86_64

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#162

Post by leejoramo »

solarkraft wrote: post #135
leejoramo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Apple has mastered multi-targeting. Apple has completed MANY major transitions 68k -> PPC -> Mac OS X -> Intel -> a near perfect 64bit transition. Then there is the NeXT side that ran on 68k, x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC Of course OS X was the foundation to iOS I think the forced death of 32bit apps last year entirely in preparation for moving to ARM.

> I think the forced death of 32bit apps last year entirely in preparation for moving to ARM You probably mean this is so they're not in multiple transitions at once. Something to note here is that Microsoft's x86 emulation only works for 32 bit apps (a processor limitation?), but with Apple having more control over their chips (and no knowledge about the exact issue) I could imagine them having it solved.

No, what I have heard from a Mac developer friend is that Apple's Xcode tool chain is likely able cross-compline x86-64 applications to ARM with relative ease. By forcing developers to move to 64bit last year, much of the work will already be done for the ARM transition.

(Of course, there are always difficult cases that will take lots of work)

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#163

Post by timw4mail »

aidos wrote: post #73

Last time they did this they managed to pull it off really well. From memory there was the ability to package apps for both architectures so they would run on either machine. And to bridge the gap there was Rosetta which allowed PowerPC binaries to run on intel Mac’s by translating in real-time with a small performance penalty. How close are arm chips to PowerPC? They’re both risc architectures, right?

Eh, really well is a matter of opinion. Compared to the earlier transition from 68k to PowerPC, the PowerPC to x86 transition was much more jarring.

The 68k emulation was present up until the death of Mac OS 9, so there is some software that could run on the original Mac all the way to the Classic environment in OS X.

Rosetta was sufficient for most applications during the transition, but there will always be software that doesn't get re-written. Rosetta was introduced in 10.4, and dropped in 10.7. Only 3 versions.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#164

Post by timw4mail »

hartator wrote: post #70

People seem to say it will be hard to transform apps to new architecture. Is that really true? My understanding is when you develop for Mac, you already have to compile to bytecode which means it's already compatible with other architectures.

No way. Even if the Swift language works that way, virtually all Mac software relies on being compiled in some fashion.

The only software platform that might be the case is Android.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#166

Post by znpy »

jdxcode wrote: post #84
coliveira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they will switch the whole product line to ARM. My guess is that they will have a line of Intel computers for a long time for professional who need them.

the article says it's eventually everything

eventually could mean one year as well as ten years.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#167

Post by jdxcode »

znpy wrote: post #166
jdxcode wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article says it's eventually everything

eventually could mean one year as well as ten years.

there is no reason to think it would be a long timeframe given their history with similar transitions

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#168

Post by zapzupnz »

salutis wrote: post #143
antipaul wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, thanks for clarifying! I, in fact, find the catalyst apps on macOS still needing work. And I’m talking the Apple ones: Music, News

Music is not a Catalyst app. Did you mean the new Podcasts app? Music is a trimmed down version of iTunes which is a Cocoa app.

Trimmed down in some respects, buggier and slower in others. It may seem to be a Catalyst to some because many aspects of the UI severely regressed to custom implementations of standard Cocoa controls that iTunes 12 used.

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#169

Post by corndoge »

philwelch wrote: post #86
corndoge wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means people need to start using buildkit and ship multiarch images. Insane that this is not already the norm. There are other arches beside x64.

What’s the server adoption of ARM? Apple switched to x86 in the first place because it had become a standard. Adopting a common standard is always going to have advantages. The advantages of supporting or adopting ARM has to outweigh those advantages to be worthwhile. This is true not just for Apple but for the server market as well. For Apple, there are two clear advantages: power efficiency (which is the same thing…

My comment wasn't really related to macs; imo if you ship binaries you should aim to provide builds for, say, the top 3 arches, and this is especially relevant for Docker images since the de facto standard for deploying them is just to pull them from dockerhub. Docker also fails in this regard since even though it knows the arch (it says it on dockerhub) docker client will still happily pull an amd64 image on ARM with no warning whatsoever

Re: Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month

#170

Post by coliveira »

jdxcode wrote: post #167
znpy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eventually could mean one year as well as ten years.

there is no reason to think it would be a long timeframe given their history with similar transitions

Apple already supports devices on different chips (Intel on laptops, ARM on iOS). There is nothing strange about them keeping laptops with different processors, depending on the intended use.
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