Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ Programmers

Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by eeiac928 on Friday September 03, 2021 @10:00AM (#28404339)

Ford or GM sell vehicles with engines taylored to customer needs. Given the volumes of chips Apple ships to the end customer, why can't they offer 6 kinds of chip architecture like the choice in colored metal finish? Why does it have to be one chip's ISA one generation at a time?

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Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by erwan577 on Friday September 03, 2021 @10:16AM (#28404516)

In your colored car analogy all cars use the same fuel. An Apple computer with a different chip arch will use different software. Yes fat binary are a thing but anyway all different archs should be tested separately. This is a real bummer especially for small dev shops.

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Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by yjftsjthsd-h on Friday September 03, 2021 @12:00PM (#28405920)

I would expect emulation to be perfectly sufficient for testing purposes?

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Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by api on Friday September 03, 2021 @10:11AM (#28404462)

The big down-side is that they'd end up with really fat binaries and edge case bugs in some apps across architectures.

Apple can pivot architectures, but I don't think they do it lightly.

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Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by brucehoult on Friday September 03, 2021 @11:10PM (#28411769)

Modern MacOS and iOS app size is completely dominated by image and other media assets. The code is down in the noise.

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Re:Apple Exploring RISC-V, Hiring RISC-V ‘High Performance’ ... by saagarjha on Friday September 03, 2021 @11:25PM (#28411815)

This is not true; most popular iOS apps have very large binary sizes.

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