macplusplus

AppleExposed said:

I bet this is good.

I just don't understand why YET.

All will be known soon fellas!!

AppleInsider said:

"We've worked with Intel for many years and know this team shares Apple's passion for designing technologies that deliver the world's best experiences for our users," said Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies.

aaronsullivan said:

macplusplus said:

If it was so easy why Microsoft has failed with Surface RT? Why desktop Windows applications didn’t run on RT?

Windows 10 on ARM is the new challenge (RT is old!) and it does better than before. You can run x86 programs fine though performance isn’t great via emulation. But I don’t know if the Windows ARM machines are near the speed of current iPad Pros.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/11/16/18098230/microsoft-windows-on-arm-64-bit-app-support-arm64

This is what I meant when I mentioned that Microsoft was helping to solve the boot camp issue. Theoretically, Window 10 on ARM would work for the desperate one or two occasional work apps some Mac users need, at least.

knowitall said:

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 It isn't guaranteed to be symmetrical but that doesn't depend on CISC or RISC (this is nowadays an outdated distinction) or the number of instructions one or the other has.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.

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 PPC 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.

aaronsullivan said:

But it won’t switch until it can replace every Intel processor across its entire range of machines;

I disagree here. As the article reminds us, the App Store will be able to distribute different binaries as needed like it currently does for iOS apps with differences and the dev strategy seems to be targeting this as well.

Ultra portable MacBook could get big battery life increase and remain fanless potentially, long before new ARM chips were suitable to replace large desktops and there’s no good reason to wait if they can achieve a good compatibility option for current software.