mjtomlin

lkrupp said:

Interesting how first generation hardware features are assumed to be etched in stone and immutable. It couldn’t possibly be that Apple wanted to get these entry level machines in the hands of users as son as possible to gauge usage and performance  No, no, assume the worst and start ranting and raving about how ALL ASi (current and future) Macs are useless pieces of garbage because these ENTRY LEVEL machines can’t run Windows natively and don't support eGPU.  It’s happening on all the major Apple centric tech blogs.

Developer support documentation and later experimentation confirmed that support for non-Apple GPUs wouldn't be enabled in hardware using Apple Silicon, effectively making eGPUs largely unusable.

zimmie said:

dewme said:

WINE/Crossover is targeting a different set of use cases than Parallels and VMWare. WINE is focused on getting individual apps running across platforms. Basically WINE is installing software shims and adapters to replace only the native operating system dependent calls, libraries, and services that the specific application actually uses with ones that work similarly on the non-native platform. This makes their adaptation, which is not emulation (as the WINE name asserts), very application specific and (in my opinion) very fragile. I say fragile because if the app developer updates their app to use different calls, libraries, or system services on the native platform it will probably no longer work with WINE until an updated set of shims and adapters is built.

I liken WINE somewhat to the way I got my ancient Northgate 101 mechanical keyboard and PS2 mouse to work with a Raspberry Pi. I chained together a full sized DIN-to-PS2 adapter to a PS2-to-USB adapter that handles both the keyboard and mouse. It works because the mechanical interfaces are translated by connector adapters and the electrical signals are translated by a little controller embedded in the PS2-to-USB adapter.  Looks kludgy but works perfectly. 

Parallels and VMWare emulate/virtualize the entire operating system on the foreign host. This sounds like it would be rather slow, but most Intel chips built over the past decade and a half have silicon level assist that improves parts of the virtualization stack significantly. Also, most modern operating systems including macOS, Unix, Linux, and Windows have various types of abstractions around the underlying hardware from applications, i.e., hypervisors, that greatly improve virtualization. All of this underlying hardware and software assist for virtualization greatly improves the performance and robustness of virtualization on these platforms.

Did I mention WINE is not an emulator? In the case of Apple Silicon, Rosetta 2 is providing the required x86 emulation/virtualization.

The WINE team can say it's not an emulator, but it fits the dictionary definition. The application sends a Windows syscall, and WINE's goal is to do the same thing as the Windows libraries and kernel. That means it is emulating the libraries and kernel. So WINE is emulating syscalls mostly by translating them to OS-native syscalls on the host OS. Rosetta is emulating an amd64 processor mostly by translating amd64 instructions into aarch64 instructions.

Meanwhile, Parallels and VMware emulate most of a whole computer, except for the processor. You have to install a whole operating system in them. x86 instruction privilege levels are tracked in "rings", with lower numbers being more privileged. Ring 0 was the most privileged for a while, then they started adding negative rings with VT-x, VT-d, and so on (the "silicon level assist" mentioned above). Windows now tries to grab all the negative rings on boot to prevent malware from grabbing them. I suspect the reason Rosetta doesn't officially support virtualization is related to processor support for these negative rings. Specifically, I bet Apple doesn't feel like faking ring 0 and below, and without faking the hardware support, performance would be really bad. It may not even work at all, because the Intel processors Apple has shipped have always supported a few of the negative rings. It's possible Parallels and VMware don't have their own software emulation for those unsupported instructions in the Mac versions of their products.

It's all emulation, or virtualization, or pathological lying. The difference is what is being lied about.

sflocal said:

mjtomlin said:

sflocal said:

If Apple really wanted to, they could probably get the Mac mini's footprint to be slightly larger than what an AppleTV box is.  I bet when it comes time to redesign the chassis, it's going to shave a lot of heft off the next gen ASi systems.

Only if they remove the power supply. At least 25% of the inside is taken up by it.

The current AppleTV has an integrated power supply.  That’s pretty small. 

caladanian said:

No gigabit option any longer?  

entropys said:

The RAM is separate to the SOC? Interesting.