mario

knowitall said:

mario said:

Soli said:

Oztotl said:

First concern is the ability to run virtual Linux and Windows OS's under the new hardware. This is key to having only a souped up Macbook Pro to support multiple platforms and clients

Why is that a concern? If you're doing that now why can't you continue doing that in the future? A low-end Mac running ARM will not make your Intel Mac stop working.

It's a concern because virtualization software as implemented today relies on Intel CPU's virtualization instructions to make virtualized code run near native speed. So if you say use Mac to run a virtual machine to emulate Linux, Intel CPU makes it possible to run Linux in the virtual environment nearly as fast as if you installed actual Linux on your Mac's hard drive.

Switch to Arm would change this, since obviously ARM doesn't have Intel's CPU virtualization instructions, and for licensing reasons might never have them.

Nonsense, Linux runs on ARM and doesn’t need special ‘virtualization instructions’. The ability to run near native speed has to do with the lack of instruction set translation (having effective context switches and virtual memory management is a plus, but that’s no problem on ARM).

Yes of course it does. But if you are deploying your stack to cloud (Amazon in particular), you deploy to Intel 64 bit Linux, not arm.

Soli said:

mario said:

Soli said:

Oztotl said:

First concern is the ability to run virtual Linux and Windows OS's under the new hardware. This is key to having only a souped up Macbook Pro to support multiple platforms and clients

Why is that a concern? If you're doing that now why can't you continue doing that in the future? A low-end Mac running ARM will not make your Intel Mac stop working.

It's a concern because virtualization software as implemented today relies on Intel CPU's virtualization instructions to make virtualized code run near native speed. So if you say use Mac to run a virtual machine to emulate Linux, Intel CPU makes it possible to run Linux in the virtual environment nearly as fast as if you installed actual Linux on your Mac's hard drive.

Switch to Arm would change this, since obviously ARM doesn't have Intel's CPU virtualization instructions, and for licensing reasons might never have them.

Your comment makes the assumption that if Apple offers a low-end Mac running RAM that you would have to stop using your Intel-based Mac. Again, this will not stop your Intel Mac from working.

Of course it won't. It will just slowly get out of date, and due to the speed at which we now release software updates and esp. security updates it will become a liability to use outdated OS/software combo in about 2 years after hypothetical arm CPU mac is released.

Soli said:

Oztotl said:

First concern is the ability to run virtual Linux and Windows OS's under the new hardware. This is key to having only a souped up Macbook Pro to support multiple platforms and clients

Why is that a concern? If you're doing that now why can't you continue doing that in the future? A low-end Mac running ARM will not make your Intel Mac stop working.

It's a concern because virtualization software as implemented today relies on Intel CPU's virtualization instructions to make virtualized code run near native speed. So if you say use Mac to run a virtual machine to emulate Linux, Intel CPU makes it possible to run Linux in the virtual environment nearly as fast as if you installed actual Linux on your Mac's hard drive.

Switch to Arm would change this, since obviously ARM doesn't have Intel's CPU virtualization instructions, and for licensing reasons might never have them.

Typical consumers should not and will not care nor understand what you are even writing about here. They will just buy a Mac and use it.

People who are concerned have vested interests in things continuing the same way.

Things are not that simple if you are a software engineer. Transition from PPC to Intel wasn't as smooth as some like to believe. PPC was big endian and Intel is little endian.  If you had C/C++ or ObjC code that did low level bit twiddling and assumed byte order, you could not just recompile the code for new CPU arch. You had to re-write the some code in architecture portable way. People use and compile code from decades ago (I know I do), and having to re-comple everything again to get my tooling right is non-trivial task (that is if I can even find source repos for some of the things I use).

There is also issue of virtualization. These days pretty much all software deployed to production is virtualized, even things like Node.js (JavaScript source code), and if you cannot install say Docker on your machine and test software as it will run in production (production is usually Linux on x86_64), then Mac becomes unviable software development option. 

This sounds like report from North Korea about the dear leader.