Apple announces Mac architecture transition from Intel to its own ARM chips, offers emulation story
Apple has just announced its plans to switch from Intel CPUs in Macs to silicon of its own design, based on the ARM architecture. This means that Apple is now designing its own chips for iOS devices and its Mac desktop and laptops. Apple said it will ship its first ARM Mac before the end of the year, and complete the Intel -> ARM transition within two years.
Apple will bring industry leading performance and performance-by-watt with its custom silicon. Apple's chips will combine custom CPU, GPU, SSD controller and many other components. The Apple silicon will include the Neural Engine for machine learning applications.
[...] "Most apps will just work".
The Next Phase: Apple Lays Out Plans To Transition Macs from x86 to Apple SoCs
[From] an architecture standpoint, the timing of the transition is a bit of an odd one. As noted by our own Arm guru, Andrei Frumusanu, Arm is on the precipice of announcing the Arm v9 ISA, which will bring several notable additions to the ISA such as Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2). So either Arm is about to announce v9, and Apple's A14 SoCs will be among the first to implement the new ISA, otherwise Apple will be setting the baseline for macOS-on-Arm as v8.2 and its NEON extensions fairly late into the ISA's lifecycle. This will be something worth keeping an eye on.
[...] [In] order to bridge the gap between Apple's current software ecosystem and where they want to be in a couple of years, Apple will once again be investing in a significant software compatibility layer in order to run current x86 applications on future Arm Macs. To be sure, Apple wants developers to recompile their applications to be native – and they are investing even more into the Xcode infrastructure to do just that – but some degree of x86 compatibility is still a necessity for now.
The cornerstone of this is the return of Rosetta, the PowerPC-to-x86 binary translation layer that Apple first used for the transition to x86 almost 15 years ago. Rosetta 2, as it's called, is designed to do the same thing for x86-to-Arm, translating x86 macOS binaries so that they can run on Arm Macs. Rosetta 2's principle mode of operation will be to translate binaries at install time.
See also: Apple Announces iOS 14 and iPadOS 14: An Overview
Apple's First ARM-Based (Mac) Product Is a Mac mini Featuring an A12Z Bionic, but Sadly, Regular Customers Can't Buy It
Previously: Apple Will Reportedly Sell a New Mac Laptop With its Own Chips Next Year
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:41AM (5 children)
As much as I like them to once again switch, I'm less certain about how great it will actually be. Apple have this tendency to go for the walled-garden approach. To preserve their "specialness", just like they previously didn't want or allow say apple-clone machines to be built by third parties and then run their software. This is why they are just a couple of percentage of the desktop market.
Then of cause it would be interesting to see some specs here of just how good it will be processor-wise. It will probably be fairly good and competitive by itself but if it's then locked down and not usable by anything beyond the magical apple-software then it sort of become super niche again and just not very interesting. Examples. Will their ARM cpu allow you to run Windows 10? Since there is an ARM-version of that. Not that I would want to but it's nice to have options. If they don't allow that they probably don't allow you to install whatever ARM version of linux there is either -- their might be one either way and it's not like I'm asking them for permission to install whatever I want but if they lock it down you might have to break shit just to get it in/on there and then it becomes a matter of perhaps the hardware just isn't that great after all.
The other thing is if this will actually be a proper desktop machine or if this is just the next step in some tablet-phone-desktop-hybrid crap. Always connected to the magical internet cloud and more or less just a viewport of the Apple-cloud experience.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:52AM (1 child)
I bought a PC a few months before the first Ma was released. I wanted to hold out for what promised to be a superior machine, but I needed a computer when i needed it, not when it would be convenient to need it.
Was I ever glad when the Mac did come out. I had a machine I could program, and the Mac purchasers didn't.
It took two years before an ordinary Mac user could program their Mac, and then it was by an interpreter, not a compiler.
For a regular developer to program a Mac, you needed the much more expensive Apple Lisa.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by everdred on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:26PM
I had a similar experience when shopping for my first smartphone shortly before the release of the original iPhone. No third-party app development was the big issue for me (but the keyboard, battery and AT&T situation didn't help either).
I bought a Palm Treo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:24AM (1 child)
If Apple develop a UEFI payload for their bootloader then, sure, no reason not to support Windows on ARM Macs as they do on their current machines.
I guess though this will kill off the Hackintosh, i.e. running macos (subject to the laws in one's country) on generic x86 hardware if the smarts inside the A13 are part of the trusted boot sequence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:36AM
QEMU already emulates various models of ARM, presumably they'll soon support these as well. GPU will be harder. But just because it's ARM, doesn't mean you have to use an on-chip GPU. Apple has a lot of video production customers that aren't necessarily going to be happy about a 90% nerf to their GPU performance, so probably they'll continue to use real PCIe GPUs in at least some models (we know Apple would prefer if nobody played games on their Serious Computers). With a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, you'll be able to use a PC with QEMU emulating the CPU and a passed-through PCIe GPU to still run MacOS on PC hardware. You will probably have to use Linux to accomplish it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:05PM
Not initially, due to Microsoft's licensing issues (a consequence of Windows 10 on ARM not being a priority anyway?):
Apple’s new ARM-based Macs won’t support Windows through Boot Camp: It’s up to Microsoft to change that [theverge.com]
It seems like Microsoft could take care of those issues fairly quickly. They will probably try to push the full Windows ARM experience on Raspberry Pi 4 as well since 2-8 GB options exist and it is proven to at least run on 1 GB [windowslatest.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]