I use my 2019 MacBook Pro for all my development these days. For things like Node.js or Java or Python and other high-level language and IDE stuff the switch to ARM probably won't make much difference.
But I also rely on a Parallels VM environment to run Windows and Linux VMs. My development target is sometimes those platforms and I need to bench test. Sometimes I have Windows-only applications like Solidworks. (Come to think of it what about the Microsoft Office suite? Are they on-board with migrating?) If I switched to an ARM processor what then?
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
I get why they are doing this but I can't help feeling I am left at the side of the road.
That is very probably the ARM "virtualization extensions" which are the ARM equivalent to Intel VT-d / AMD-V. If you are looking for translation between ARM to x86-64, look somewhere else than that.
Microsoft already has Office ready to go, they showed it off at the event. They also showed it running a linux VM but I don't have the details on it. As for emulation, at least for Mac software, it looks impressive performance wise. They demoed Tomb Raider and Maya both running the intel binaries, and they ran really well. And that's on the dev kit processor, which is the SOC from the current iPad Pro (although I'm sure it's been clocked up to take advantage of the additional cooling in the dev kit Mac mini
Looks like Windows 10 is available on ARM as well so maybe we won't lose dual boot capabilities either!
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]
Which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers that Windows RT was a thing. Also Adobe is now very much in a different place then it used to be. It got bitten hard by the previous transition with several versions of it's suite not available on Mac kind of forever tarnishing Mac as the creator's platform of choice. But people were equally pissed at Adobe at the time, so they learnt a bit from the last transition.
Windows RT died a few years back (updates stopped in 2015, standard support stopped in 2018), but Microsoft has had Windows 10 running on ARM since 2016. It's ostensibly the full version of Windows 10, and it even includes an emulation layer that attempts to run x86 apps in a way that appears to be native to the user. From what I hear (I have not used it, but I started looking into it yesterday after Apple's announcements, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt), it's okay, but it sounds like it runs
We all felt the same way when we purchased G5 mac-pro's and they switched to intel a couple of years later.
The nice thing is that it took a solid 2-3 years before powerpc was no longer viable after the switch. If you can get 4-5 years out of your current macbook pro before 'having' to switch, that is a pretty solid investment; especially since you can still run windows/linux/etc on the current hardware.
I can see the 'switch' to ARM taking a bit longer this time around mainly because there are a lot of
Apple said they will be selling Intel Macs for years to come. Also I think the transition to ARM won't be like the transition to Intel. There was little reason for PowerPC once Intel was available. The places where a G5 had an advantage were too highly specialized. In contrast an Intel Mac has the advantage of a single machine that can natively boot macOS or Windows. Mac market shared doubled once people no longer had to choose Mac or PC, once they could have one machine with both. I think this will give I
I remember the transition from a G5 PPC to Intel. The G5 running Tiger was amazing. The Intel running 10.5 was not. The G5 running 10.5 was also not good either. CS2 running in Rosetta was unstable and prone to trashing production files. 10.6 was an "apology" OS released at a discount price that focussed on stability by ditching PPC support in total.
Today's MacOS I don't think has the engineering quality behind it that 10.4 did. Day to day I see stuff that is just short sighted design, removing stable and p
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
While they obviously would pick something that works well for the announcement - the demo of an x86 Tomb Raider game running on their A12Z-based Mac was quite impressive. As was the similar demo of x86 Maya.
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
Apple has been putting a lot into LLVM over the last decade. Except for dynamic code execution, where a VM is running on top of the OS and generating the wrong instruction set on the fly, it will precompile the x86-64 into ARM64. My guess is the x86 is essentially treated like the source code of a particularly pedantic programming language, turned into an intermediate LLVM representation, then re-compiled down into ARM. It will be interesting to see how fast it is, but there's no particular reason why it wo
It's amazing how many ignorant people pretend to be experts on/.
If you guess x86 object can be considered a "particularly pedantic programming language", whatever than means, stop guessing. You don't understand what is required.
Are you saying itâ(TM)s impossible to turn a binary back into an LLVM intermediate representation? There are already open source projects that do exactly that (see RetDec), and I assume with Apple willing to throw a billion dollars at the transition that theyâ(TM)ll do even better.
Itâ(TM)s easily possible that the reverse-x86 LLVM representation wonâ(TM)t be as easily optimized for ARM as one generated from original source, but I wouldnâ(TM)t bet on it being THAT much slower.
I highly doubt they are even attempting to recompile an entire x86_64 binary into ARM64, I think that's just a chinese whispers thing that's happened from the single statement we've heard. It's far more likely it's just plain old DynaRec and JIT just with the added trick of getting a head start on it before first run. Imagine if a Java program got to run the JIT compilation step on install instead of first run, people might have less of a "Java is slow" opinion if that had been the standard from the beginni
I work on cross-platform SDKs, and the MAC has been a brilliant platform for this. Windows and Linux inside VMWare don't exactly have stellar performance, although mostly that seems to be an I/O issue, but I can't image this will work anywhere near as well if at all on an ARM-based Mac. It remains to be seen.
Microsoft already have a lot of experience porting Office to ARM, be it for Windows ARM or for mobile devices, so I can't imagine it would take them too long. Apps that will suffer are those with ass
Also if you're working in docker environment, the target deploy environment is not going to be ARM docker. So you'll need additional steps for build/testing - the docker you develop is not the docker you deploy anymore.
I'm sort of feeling like you are at the moment. I doubt my next laptop is from Apple.
"An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth."
-- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments
I'll be hanging on to x86 Mac for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
I use my 2019 MacBook Pro for all my development these days. For things like Node.js or Java or Python and other high-level language and IDE stuff the switch to ARM probably won't make much difference.
But I also rely on a Parallels VM environment to run Windows and Linux VMs. My development target is sometimes those platforms and I need to bench test. Sometimes I have Windows-only applications like Solidworks. (Come to think of it what about the Microsoft Office suite? Are they on-board with migrating?) If I switched to an ARM processor what then?
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
I get why they are doing this but I can't help feeling I am left at the side of the road.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That is very probably the ARM "virtualization extensions" which are the ARM equivalent to Intel VT-d / AMD-V. If you are looking for translation between ARM to x86-64, look somewhere else than that.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:I'll be hanging on to x86 Mac for a while (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers that Windows RT was a thing. Also Adobe is now very much in a different place then it used to be. It got bitten hard by the previous transition with several versions of it's suite not available on Mac kind of forever tarnishing Mac as the creator's platform of choice. But people were equally pissed at Adobe at the time, so they learnt a bit from the last transition.
Re: (Score:2)
Windows RT died a few years back (updates stopped in 2015, standard support stopped in 2018), but Microsoft has had Windows 10 running on ARM since 2016. It's ostensibly the full version of Windows 10, and it even includes an emulation layer that attempts to run x86 apps in a way that appears to be native to the user. From what I hear (I have not used it, but I started looking into it yesterday after Apple's announcements, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt), it's okay, but it sounds like it runs
Re: (Score:2)
Apple selling Intel Macs for years to come (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I remember the transition from a G5 PPC to Intel. The G5 running Tiger was amazing. The Intel running 10.5 was not. The G5 running 10.5 was also not good either. CS2 running in Rosetta was unstable and prone to trashing production files. 10.6 was an "apology" OS released at a discount price that focussed on stability by ditching PPC support in total.
Today's MacOS I don't think has the engineering quality behind it that 10.4 did. Day to day I see stuff that is just short sighted design, removing stable and p
Re: (Score:2)
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
While they obviously would pick something that works well for the announcement - the demo of an x86 Tomb Raider game running on their A12Z-based Mac was quite impressive. As was the similar demo of x86 Maya.
Re: (Score:2)
I can imagine an emulation mode working but I can't imagine it would be very fast. I wouldn't buy a new system to go backwards in performance.
Apple has been putting a lot into LLVM over the last decade. Except for dynamic code execution, where a VM is running on top of the OS and generating the wrong instruction set on the fly, it will precompile the x86-64 into ARM64. My guess is the x86 is essentially treated like the source code of a particularly pedantic programming language, turned into an intermediate LLVM representation, then re-compiled down into ARM. It will be interesting to see how fast it is, but there's no particular reason why it wo
Re: (Score:1)
It's amazing how many ignorant people pretend to be experts on /.
If you guess x86 object can be considered a "particularly pedantic programming language", whatever than means, stop guessing. You don't understand what is required.
Re: I'll be hanging on to x86 Mac for a while (Score:2)
Are you saying itâ(TM)s impossible to turn a binary back into an LLVM intermediate representation? There are already open source projects that do exactly that (see RetDec), and I assume with Apple willing to throw a billion dollars at the transition that theyâ(TM)ll do even better.
Itâ(TM)s easily possible that the reverse-x86 LLVM representation wonâ(TM)t be as easily optimized for ARM as one generated from original source, but I wouldnâ(TM)t bet on it being THAT much slower.
And App
Re: (Score:2)
I highly doubt they are even attempting to recompile an entire x86_64 binary into ARM64, I think that's just a chinese whispers thing that's happened from the single statement we've heard. It's far more likely it's just plain old DynaRec and JIT just with the added trick of getting a head start on it before first run. Imagine if a Java program got to run the JIT compilation step on install instead of first run, people might have less of a "Java is slow" opinion if that had been the standard from the beginni
Re: I'll be hanging on to x86 Mac for a while (Score:2)
I work on cross-platform SDKs, and the MAC has been a brilliant platform for this. Windows and Linux inside VMWare don't exactly have stellar performance, although mostly that seems to be an I/O issue, but I can't image this will work anywhere near as well if at all on an ARM-based Mac. It remains to be seen.
Microsoft already have a lot of experience porting Office to ARM, be it for Windows ARM or for mobile devices, so I can't imagine it would take them too long. Apps that will suffer are those with ass
Re: (Score:2)
Also if you're working in docker environment, the target deploy environment is not going to be ARM docker. So you'll need additional steps for build/testing - the docker you develop is not the docker you deploy anymore.
I'm sort of feeling like you are at the moment. I doubt my next laptop is from Apple.