ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer

Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by geofft on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:06PM (#22659621)

Surprised to see no mention of emulation. Apple has pulled off emulation-based transitions twice before - from 680x0 to PowerPC and from PowerPC to x86 - and nobody else has tried. Why wouldn't we expect Apple to try again?

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by DaiPlusPlus on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:12PM (#22659672)

(As I preface, I have zero qualification to speak about microprocessor and instruction set design)

Microsoft currently has 32-bit-only x86 emulation on the ARM-powered Surface X and the reviews aren't positive. I don't know if it's actual emulation, trap/HLE emulation, dynamic translation, or something else - but Microsoft takes backwards compatibility far more seriously than Apple does, and if that's the best Microsoft can do, what hope does Apple have?

While x86 and ARM's ISAs are fundamentally different (y'know: CISC vs RISC) but given that x86 CPUs today are generally implemented using RISC microcode - could x86 be emulated by instead translating x86's RISC microcode to ARM?

I realize another alternative exists: Apple could buy-up cheap, low-power Intel x86/x64 chips (like an i3 or something) as a co-processor to the primary ARM chip and only use the i3 if ARM-based emulation is too slow for a given process?

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by scarface74 on Sunday March 22, 2020 @11:45PM (#22661081)

Windows is much more bloated with legacy crap, they don’t design their own chips and they haven’t done architecture transitions twice already.

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by discordance on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:12PM (#22659669)

Do you mean that macOS apps would run on iPad?

Seems like a lot of work would need to go into moving existing macOS apps to touch friendly interfaces if that were the case. I’m using a Bluetooth mouse and the cursor is finger sized.

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by simonh on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:16PM (#22659703)

I think the idea is that ideally apps should be recompiled for ARM, but for those apps that aren’t you will still want to have a way to run those x86 apps on an ARM Mac.

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by dbbk on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:17PM (#22659708)

I think they're obviously talking about macOS x86 apps running on macOS ARM.

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Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer by rocky1138 on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:12PM (#22659674)

I don't have any links or sources, but I remember reading somewhere that Intel has a ton of patents for x86 stuff, making emulation a legally risky manoeuver.

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