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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

#81

This is just a rehash of Bloomberg reporting. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-pla... older: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/apple-aim... --- Personally, I gave up on the Apple ecosystem years ago and moved to Linux. But I feel ambivalent about this. On one hand, the iPhone/Pad chips have impressive performance and power consumption, at least for the mobile use case. Some co…

Funny how every regurgitation of the same article becomes more certain: "may" - "aims" - "plans" - "will". "According to people familiar with the matter."

A lot of reporting on every different type of topic is sourced like this, but from the quality outlets, the facts tend to be right more often than they're wrong, blunders notwithstanding.

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

#82
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will continue to do so because they know more than anybody that they meet different needs Will they, though? Because Catalina seems like a giant step in the wrong direction if you’re thinking they’re acknowledging the developer - or even power user - need. Seems to me they’ve doubled down on the iOS approach to macOS.

In Catalina, I see the move towards these macOS & iOS compatible apps ("Catalyst") as making it easier to develop apps for both. It's a service for developers, if you will (I am not an app developer!) I don't necessarily see it as trying to create a single OS for both desktop and mobile.

To be clear: I’m not saying they’re trying to create a single OS. I’m saying the “Apple knows best” concepts they’re applying to macOS that are seemingly inspired by iOS are very hostile to a large part of their user base.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means you better think about buying a thinkpad.

Docker runs on Arm chips.

Yes, but Docker on ARM won't run your x86 containers.

Docker can run a different OS but not a different arch.

The point of Docker is kind of having the exactly same thing here and there.

With Docker, I can compile, run, test and debug my backend service on Windows or Mac and deploy to Linux, knowing that I ran and tested the exact same binary.

If you deploy on x86 (as you do), having ARM Docker doesn't help you much.

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

#84
post #7

what does this mean for running docker containers on macos?

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

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

#86
post #7

what does this mean for running docker containers on macos?

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 as heat) and vertical integration. AWS can enjoy the same advantages from ARM. But these are both essentially hardware providers. AWS still offers x86-based EC2 instances and while they might encourage users to migrate to ARM (by perhaps passing on their own savings), there’s a lot of inertia there. Apple is a company that bites the bullet and forces these migrations, but how many developers will support or migrate to ARM just because that’s what’s running their MacBook?

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

#87
post #66

Interesting. I imagine they'll have to provide some sort of x86/amd64 compat layer as otherwise this kills every application available for macos right now. I hope they don't also continue to lock down macos (though I imagine they intend to) by restricting applications to only being available from the app store. That would set a terrible precedent for personal computing.

It kills every application whose developer doesn't issue an update in the next 12 months. If you buy an ARM based Mac and your favorite app doesn't work it was abandoned by the developer. As a developer there is a nuisance of one more damn thing to test, but compared to the nuisance iOS developers go through to make sure it looks nice on all the different sized devices, testing on an ARM before release isn't bad. Hav…

An app that isn't updated in 12 months isn't necessarily "abandoned". It can also be complete.

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

#88

I think this is a good news. The vast amount of people use their laptop for little more than running a web browser, and AArch64 chips will make those laptops cheaper to produce (intel charges Apple upwards of $400+ for high end chips[1]) Then there's everyone doing local development in interpreted languages, most of which have stable support for AArch64. Java, python, ruby, go on AArch64? No problem. The biggest hit…

What is special about BSD syscalls on AArch64? Are you saying they will be different or absent?

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

#89

This is just a rehash of Bloomberg reporting. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-pla... older: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/apple-aim... --- Personally, I gave up on the Apple ecosystem years ago and moved to Linux. But I feel ambivalent about this. On one hand, the iPhone/Pad chips have impressive performance and power consumption, at least for the mobile use case. Some co…

Discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465364

Does this article provide any actual new info compared to the one from Bloomberg?

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

#90
post #22

Time to urgently make sure your favourite backend is generating decent AArch64 code and you app is compatible with a weak memory model...

The memory model of the ISA != the memory model of your code. C has a memory model and any correct C code is compiled to the correct ARM assembly. It's only really an issue if you are translating over x86 assembly, and then you probably have lots of other issues to worry about.

Does C really have a memory model for multithreaded applications? I tried googling but could only find references to C++11.

Also, failing to adhere to a memory model is one of those tricky things where things seem to work alright on architectures with a strong SMP coherency. But then it all breaks down and you end up chasing heisenbugs all over the place when those assumptions no longer hold. It's not easy to prove a lack of race condition bugs. You usually don't get a compiler error if you forget to mark things volatile, forget memory barriers or forget proper locking.

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