knowitall

elijahg said:

A significant factor in the PPC > x86 switch was Rosetta. It is much easier to emulate RISC PPC with its relatively small instruction set than it is CISC x86, and now x64. PPC apps running in Rosetta weren't much slower than the native ones, but that was also partly offset by the Intel CPUs being much, much faster than PPC ones. The A-series CPUs are quick, and in a less power and thermally constrained environment no doubt even quicker - but CISC emulation on RISC architectures is excruciatingly slow, no matter how fast the native CPU. Remember Connectix's Virtual PC? That emulated an x86 machine on PPC. Installing Win98 took 3 or 4 hours even on a G5. Of course API level emulation a-la Rosetta has less overhead, but it's still slow. 

Also, people who are switching to Mac can still use the Mac as a PC if they need to. It provides a comfort blanket. As soon as Apple switched to x86, Mac sales took off.

I wouldn't call running Windows comfortable, not even in another universe.
Its best to get rid of it.
Running ppc apps under Rosetta was slow, very slow and some apps didn't run at all.
Running CISC on RISC or vise versa isn't inherently more difficult. It isn't guaranteed to be symmetrical but that doesn't depend on CISC or RISC (this is nowadays an outdated distinction) or the number of instructions one or the other has.
I would say that a 64 bit instruction set (or not) is a more important notion when translating instruction sets. The internal state of the processor and how easily it is represented on another (processor) is also an important notion.      
I would expect to see a difference in efficiency even per instruction.
All in all I expect that on average only a few instructions are needed to translate one instruction set to another no matter what.
Current processors are extremely fast so a factor 5 or so will not be noticed when running most apps.

Edit: one fun fact to consider is that Intel already hardware translates its (CISC) instruction set(s) on its internal RISC instruction set at full clock speed, so its certain that this isn't a slow option. 

camc said:

Nice to read if you are locked in the thermal corner of a prosumer laptop. But sorry, from the iMac Pro perspective I see no interest at all in this prospected evolution.

What? You don't want to run your software an order of magnitude faster for two orders of magnitude less money?

Encryption is open source and can easily be created if it wasn’t.
Luckily the world isn't the USA, good luck at stopping Telegram.   

One easy way is to log out and in (this kills all apps running in your session and restarts the apps after login).
Reboot if all else fails (reasonably fast if running from a ssd).

Mike Wuerthele said:

knowitall said:

Out of the box macOS makes snapshots of everything updated which can be restored using time machine.
The snapshots are automatically placed on your local disk and do not depend on other (external) drives.
So you are protected even without a backup plan or whatever configuration is suggested.

This isn't a backup plan. This is protection against inadvertent file deletion by the user.

Sure, I indicated you really don't need one.
Nice to know I think.