AppleSince1976

rain22 said:

“ but it suggests that new Apple Silicon Macs will not be struggling to keep up with the graphics on Intel Macs.”

That would be nice - but seems extremely dependent on programs being optimized. The anemic library of titles will probably shrink even further - at least until there is market saturation. 

Mac users will be stuck using dumbed down iOS software for a long time I feel. 

After all - This is the motivation isn’t it? Eventually have just 1 OS that can be modded to facilitate the device. 

mdriftmeyer said:

rcfa said:

polymnia said:

I wonder: is it possible that the upcoming Mac-specific Apple Silicon chips might include features specifically designed to accelerate Rosetta 2?

They can design anything they like now. Maybe smoothing the transition by accelerating Rosetta 2 would be a good move. Perhaps just for the first couple generations. They could drop it once MacOS drops support for Rosetta 2. 

Whatever would help Rosetta 2 would very likely also help a variety of virtualization solutions. As such, if they were to make such additions to the ARM instruction set, there would be very little incentive to ever remove them again.
i would however expect Apple to tread very carefully with extending the ARM programming model, particularly in an unilateral move.

Because it won't ever happen as they don't own the IP.

mdriftmeyer said:

It'll get worse once the lockdown system is opened back up and regular OS X is running full processes/threads. This has a long way to go; hence the two year window.

KITA said:

This assumes Apple has the best parts, integration and ecosystem. That's not always the case. Other manufacturers have done considerable work on integration and the major productivity ecosystem is not with Apple. The point of the Cortex X program allows partners to have custom ARM solutions made for their need. This is not a roadmap product and is not something everyone has access to and isn't restricted to a product roadmap or the current ISA version being used by ARM's mainstream designs.

melgross said:

AppleSince1976 said:

melgross said:

Unlike what the article says, Apple didn’t say what the machines they were using for their demos had in the way of RAM or storage. They did say how much would be in the developer machines. And I would also like to point out that the iPad Pro has 6GB RAM, not 16GB, so the developer machines are not outfitted the same. That’s not surprising, because the Mac needs more resources than iOS devices.

Good point; but since they obviously had this transition in mind when they did the A12Z, I submit they designed an External memory bus into the SoC, allowing the internal RAM and Flash to be supplanted/replaced with external resources.

Many Microcontrollers have supported such an expansion bus for decades; in fact, before EPROM and flash-based microcontrollers were the norm, it was the only way to do a “Development Version” of most microcontrollers.

Afterall, when you’ve got a BGA package with a few hundred pads, what’s another 96 or so for an expansion bus?

Are you stating that the A12Z, and by extension, all Apple SoC’s have their RAM on chip, when you say internal? Because that’s not true.