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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, 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.