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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 takyon on Tuesday June 23 2020, @09:54AM (4 children)
I don't think putting more functions into a SoC necessarily puts an end to general purpose computing. There are other ARM SoCs that have added GPU, AI acceleration, audio handling, wireless, etc. but are not particularly locked down and run Linux.
And what's the solution? RISC-V?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)
While that is technically correct, it ignores the company doing it. Apple has always striven to control the end user with incompatible formats, dating all the way back to the old floppy drives of the Apple ][. This doesn't necessarily mean that a new processor will be designed to control the end-user, but there's a long history saying "that's the way to bet".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:42PM
True. But I would strongly suspect that there will be some heavily encrypted chip on the motherboard to show that this is a "proper licensed Mac" and things should run smooth and the hardware has not been messed with cause if you do it's brick time. Sort of like all the game consoles have done, and it often to ages for hacks to come out to circumvent that and then usually as a started thru various software bugs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:50PM
That's right. From TFS, bracketed remark mine:
Any Apple Mac customer who does not take seriously the adage "those who not study history are doomed to repeat it" is certain to be bitten by Apple's repeated, end-user-hostile, "here-now gone-later" treatment. The discarding of the first Rosetta was an exercise in pulling people's feet out from under them, turning huge amounts of invested time and money into vapor.
While I really do like most of OS X itself, Apple has repeatedly stepped all over its users during the decades I've been a customer of theirs. Their idea of a "transition" is to stab the customer who gave them (arguably too much) money in the back.
The upside here is that there are (and will continue to be) many high quality Intel-based Macs available via EBay and so forth, so I'll be able to keep using all the software I've purchased and learned to use into the indefinite — and distant — future.
As for the free software applications I write (image processing, SDR clients), they have always been developed on OS X, and ported to Windows in an OS X VM. I'm going to reverse that now; develop native under Windows on the brand new Intel-based, non-Apple hardware I just ordered today and backport on the Mac until the day Apple throws their Intel users under the bus, as history indicates they will almost certainly do.
Apple has made it clear that the future of Mac hardware is a trip ever deeper into an ever narrower niche. I'm not going to go any further in that direction with them, nor will I develop software that supports such an undertaking. Whatever Microsoft's other faults are (and they are many and significant), they have at least worked hard to maintain compatibility and not shaft their customers by breaking their investments of time and money.
IMO, we don't need less compatibility and more software target fragmentation. The more uniform the playing field is for developers, and the wider the access to software solutions is for end users, the more beneficial to society computers will become. Apple's clearly on a quest to isolate its userbase. I hope a dragon eats them.
TL;DR: Fuck you, Apple.
--
You know that little voice in your
head that keeps you from saying things?
I should probably get one of those.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:22PM
Arm is a disgusting PITA with Linux. Fuck Arm and the vile whores at Apple.