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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: 4, Insightful) by ilsa on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:38PM (12 children)
I'm not so sure of that. The RDF for the most part vanished with Jobs. There are always gonna be sycophants that create some bizarre emotional dependency on their choice of tech brand, but I think people are going to be a lot more down to earth about this. Just look at last year's WWDC when the audience openly mocked Apple's obnoxious $1000 monitor stand.
At least among the more technical crowd I run with, Apple's endless missteps over the last, 5ish years have significantly soured people's feelings towards Apple's products. No maintainability, no usable ports, and the single stupidest keyboard to have graced the world in decades.
IMO Apple should be falling down really hard right now. However, thanks to Microsoft and the god forsaken cesspool that is Windows 10, Microsoft has handed Apple a license to print money. I've asked people why they keep using Apple and the answer has universally been, "Because it's not Windows." ie: Not because Apple is better, because it is less worse than the alternative.
(And no, Linux doesn't count. It still falls down in too many ways to be a decent alternative desktop os)
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:34PM (1 child)
That is the thing in general tho, you don't have to have the best product -- it doesn't even have to be good. It just has to suck less then the competition. I guess that is their niche, or one of them: Apple -- sucking less!
I wonder how many of those 1k monitor stands they sold. The apple aficionados (or whatever they are called) might mock it in public or on their social media to be cool with their peps but then they buy the stand anyway cause it just looks so awesome and fits so great with all their other apple hardware. As noted if you keep paying thousands of extra bucks for hardware just cause of the silver plastic apple logo on the front then you probably have another 1k over to spend on a monitor stand.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:34PM
Hey, it works for mobile too. Though I'm of the opinion that Android sucks less than iOS, both are pretty shitty so I can see why someone might prefer iOS.
Admittedly, the biggest draw for Android is that if you want a dumbed down, user-hostile phone, you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to get one.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:42PM (5 children)
*How* does Linux fall down as a desktop system? I've used it for years without significant problems. At one time the applications available were lacking, but these days it's got everything I want to use. To me it appears that what it lacks is a marketing department pushing it, and that's fine with me.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Tuesday June 23 2020, @08:22PM
It falls down because you either have to know too much about Linux to use it or treat it like an appliance. There's not enough 'it just works' when doing things like Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint, Finalcut Pro, and so forth. And when you finally do fix those things, you'll alienate the geeks and nerds like me who use Linux to bolster their cred. I want a tinkerer's desktop, not some locked-down, corporate polished productivity turd that treats me like a product, consumtard, or hostile user.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ilsa on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:42PM (3 children)
This horse has been flogged so much that even the skeleton is disintegrating.
Linux covers exactly two use cases.
1. An experience that is so curated that the user doesn't even know they're using Linux (eg: Android, ChromeOS, etc)
2. You really really love dicking around with your computer, and/or are experienced with this kind of thing like sysadmins, etc.
While general usage at any given moment may well be fine, you will run into situations that require you to open a CLI or otherwise make an obscure conf file change in order to accomplish what you need. That has been reduced somewhat over the years, but it's still an issue. Hell, Gnome still won't let you add arbitrary applications to the application menu unless you open text editor and construct your own .desktop file from scratch. 'scuze me what now? Mac and Windows will literally let you do this with a single drag and drop operation.
Some things are so bloody idiotic that it leaves people incredulous. A great example is if you're on a laptop with discrete graphics, for example, you need to choose between battery saving integrated graphics or battery destroying discrete graphics, and you need to reboot/relogin (which for a consumer is basically the same thing) to change the setting. It's 2020 and you need to reboot to change your video chip. Something Windows and MacOS solved, what, 2 decades ago? And no, I don't care what the reasons are, no matter how justifiable you think they are.
The number of examples I could list are nearly endless. And nevermind the application ecosystem that is filled with software that, while they technically mark the necessary feature checkboxes, vary from unpolished, to difficult to use, to not fit for purpose for anything more than the simplest of use cases.
This is less of a problem for those of us that choose to swim in the deep end, but sometimes I just want to get my effing job done and *don't* want to go down a 4 hour irrelevant rabbit hole to change some obscure setting that is blocking my ability to do the task that I'm actually being paid to perform.
And this doesn't count blatant screw ups like when Ubuntu 19 shipped with a known broken crypto library that effectively disabled Active Directory integration, and then proceeded to never correct. The fix required you to install replacement libraries from some random 3rd party repo, which is completely unacceptable.
Meanwhile, the linux community seems to care FAR more about bullshit like theme choices and systemd, rather than truly important issues, like the fore-mentioned total lack of polish.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @06:15PM
Waah waah waah. If you want someone to hold your hand, go pay for a consultant to integrate this free software complete strangers gave you out of the goodness of their hearts. You didn't pay for Ubuntu, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @09:48PM
With respect to "like the fore-mentioned total lack of polish." - I still do stumble over polish issues in Windows and my friends with Macs stumble over them in Macs. It's not as often, and not as severe, but to me it's a 100 times as infuriating that companies with quite literally more than 1,000 times as much resources as the open source community still screws things up. No, a loosely connected group of volunteers that mostly gets zero money for their work on desktop apps can't match Microsoft, Google, or Apple. But they covered 80% of the gap with 0.01% of the resources - which makes me scream in frustration every time my work laptop hangs, or displays an error, or closes the File Explorer suddenly.
( I'm the Linux nerd that responded with https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=38132&page=1&cid=1011956#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] )
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 24 2020, @11:54PM
Sorry, but no. Once upon a time decades ago I liked fiddling with the OS and manipulating things. Now I just want it to work as I want, be reliable, and have the applications I need. Linux suits me fine. As it happens I use Mate, because that's the interface I got used to, and the others kept changing to be flashier. Gnome 2 was fine. So was KDE3. Actually, I think KDE3 was the best, but I don't fight city hall, so I use mate. And I use pretty much the default install, because I *don't* like fiddling with the OS, and it's pretty much what I want without messing around. But I'm not too particular, Gnome2 was fine with me, and so was KDE3. KDE4 became acceptable, but it did a bunch more stuff than I wanted. And I've stuck with mate and avoided fiddling with my OS (except apt-get update or install a new application) while MSWind has gone through 3 or 4 cycles of update/replace/revise. MSWind is the one that has required lots of fiddling with the OS and adjusting to new GUIs. And I haven't even looked at a Mac since OS10.4, so I can't say what it's been doing. As for MS, if someone asks for help I say "I don't do windows"...and that's the right answer, because I haven't touched it since slightly before 2000.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fyngyrz on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:57PM
Well, they needed something to go along with the single stupidest mouse [flickr.com] to have graced the world in decades.
--
Wow. Apparently it's "rude" to ask the parents
of a kid on a leash if it was a rescue.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:25PM (1 child)
"And no, Linux doesn't count. It still falls down in too many ways to be a decent alternative desktop os"
for you dumb fucking monkeys maybe.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:13PM
Thank you for demonstrating yet another reason why Linux will always be a failure as a desktop.
Nothing sys, "This is the platform for me!" like having random assholes throwing insults at you because you arn't willing or able to invest hours of your life to figure out how to use an OS that was never user friendly to begin with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:27PM
Linux falls down for the average person for two reasons:
1. The whole fucking world is hooked on Microsoft file formats. LibreOffice, Google Docs, and other alternatives are fine office suites in their own right but everyone occasionally needs to send a document to a potential employer, a school, a hospital, or a government office. About 10% of the time, all of those Microsoft Office alternatives get the file conversion to the Microsoft format wrong, and it will cause you no end of pain when the recipient can't open the file, or can't read it, or decides you're a complete idiot because your paperwork has weird margin offsets and line breaks in the wrong places. And on top of that, a significant minority of the white collar workers of the world are Excel power users. They are completely unwilling to spend hundreds of hours learning equivalent skills for LibreOffice Calc or Google Sheets - especially since the LibreOffice Calc script they write in Python can't be exported to Excel for their friend that still uses Excel. Microsoft has the world locked down here.
2. The general rule of thumb for almost any Windows video game for any version of Windows on the entire internet is that if you have Windows 10, a sufficiently powerful CPU and GPU, and enough RAM, you can run it. The WINE project to run Windows software on Linux is amazing, especially with the work Valve Corporation is contributing as part of their WINE for Steam project called Proton. The percentage of Windows video games that run flawlessly on Linux using WINE or Steam Proton is increasing rapidly, but it will never reach 100% because it's all but impossible to make WINE support all of the crazy Digital Rights Management tools that are integrated in some games. If you talk your friend into switching to Linux and then she finds out that Soul Caliber 6 will open on WINE but is blocked from multiplayer, she will go back to Windows and never try Linux again.
Now, as a Linux enthusiast, I understand these two limitations and I am willing to live with them. I have happily used exclusively Linux for my home computers for years. But whenever I consider helping a friend or family member migrate to Linux I have a long discussion with them about this first - and often, we agree it does not make sense for them to switch.