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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, 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.