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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 toddestan on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:50PM (6 children)
Back when they made the M68K to PPC, and when they made the PPC to Intel transition, Apple was a computer company. It was even in the name, Apple Computers, Inc. So they had a pretty big vested interest in the transition being successful.
Today they are a phone company and an app store. It's obvious for most of the last decade that they don't care about the Mac like they used to, which is why their line of Macs languishes and a new Mac often uses hardware that is already years out of date. Which is to be expected since they make their money off of their mobile platform. If the Mac disappeared tomorrow, Apple, Inc. would hardly notice.
This could very well be the end of the Mac. If users shun the new Macs, or if developers decide it's not worth going through another transition for an increasingly shrinking user base and just dump the platform entirely, I could see Apple quietly killing off their computer line in a few years. That is, assuming they don't finally complete the merge with the mobile product line, and a Mac is little more than iPad with an attached keyboard.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:02AM (5 children)
I would think you last sentence there is actually the ultimate goal for them, and quite honestly for a lot of "computer" companies. Perhaps it's not all to bad? People that are into, or actually need, computers will still get computers and everyone else will just get one of them laptop-mobile-tablet-hybrids. Come to think of it isn't that sort of what is already happening?
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:39AM (3 children)
I've also suspected that's their ultimate goal - to turn the Mac into the same kind of walled garden that the iPhone/iPad is. Getting a sweet 30% cut of every software sale on the Mac must be mighty tempting.
Anyone who wants or needs a computer will still buy a computer - it just won't be one with a fruit on it. Not that Apple has made a serious computer for some time now - the Mac Pro has been a joke for years now.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday June 28 2020, @06:04PM (2 children)
Unless you develop software for a living or as a hobby. No fruit, no access to the market of Mac, iPhone, and iPad users. Even if you plan to deploy your application as a web application, you still needed a Mac in order to debug the client side in Safari last I checked.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Monday June 29 2020, @01:49AM (1 child)
The Mac software market has been shrinking for some time now, and some of the big developers on Mac such as Adobe have switched from developing on the Mac and porting to Windows later to developing on Windows and releasing a Mac port later. It's a pretty good bet a lot of them are going to give some thought as to whether it's worth going through another transition.
As you allude to, the big market for Macs is to develop software for iOS, and will continue that way so long as Apple doesn't open up their platform (and iOS remains relevant). This could take a pretty big hit if Apple starts allowing for development to take place on iPads, as you could always just use an iPad + keyboard instead of Mac. Assuming that iPad + keyboard isn't just a Macbook anyway.
While I'm sure anyone developing websites cares about Safari on iOS, I kind of doubt it for Safari on the Mac. Sure, some will care, but I would guess a lot would test on iOS Safari and assume Mac Safari will work too for the small fraction of Mac users who actually use Safari. And if it doesn't, the answer will just be "install Chrome" anyway.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday July 05 2020, @02:10AM
The debugger and inspector tools for Safari on iOS are displayed inside Safari on macOS.
Chrome for iOS uses the same WKWebView control as Safari for iOS and thus has the same engine quirks.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday June 28 2020, @06:02PM
I fear that as this trend continues, the total global production of general-purpose home computers will shrink to below replacement. This would mean that "[p]eople that are into, or actually need, computers" might not be able to find one.