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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: 3, Insightful) by Subsentient on Tuesday June 23 2020, @11:54AM (3 children)
Apple was already dead to me ever since it became impossible to boot Linux on the new Mac Minis. Not like I'd have bought one before that though, but I'd probably have accepted it as a gift. Now, it's a doorstop to me.
Their new aarch64 Mac hardware will have locked bootloaders, just like their iPhones and iPads, and will be totally useless for anything other than macOS.
I'm really growing to hate Apple. They're so predictably evil.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:34PM
Right. If they announced unlocked boot loaders and published documentation for creating device drivers for their new hardware in Linux (or anything else), I would be excited for the change. As is, no thank you.
The only good news I see is that existing x86_64 Macs should depreciate rapidly in value. Maybe in a year or two I'll pick one up and put Linux on it.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:36PM (1 child)
When did they do that? A quick search gave me instructions for installing Linux on a latest generation Mac Mini. It was broken for a while about a decade ago because Apple shipped a UEFI implementation without legacy BIOS emulation, but Linux has been able to boot on pure-UEFI systems for a very long time.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Monday June 29 2020, @02:08AM
It's the T2 security chip. If that's enabled, your Mac can only boot OSes with the right keys, which means MacOS and Windows. Linux (and anything else) gets the middle finger from Apple. Apple does let you disable the T2 chip, but that also disables the internal storage, so you now have to install to an external drive. At which point you're now running Linux on your Mac Mini.
I'll leave it to the pedants as to whether this counts as installing Linux on a Mac Mini since it's not actually installed on the built-in internal storage.