Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

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That would definitely be an interesting and very surprising development. Like I would really like to hear Apple's rational for developing an x86 CPU.

x86 is a far more complex CPU architecture which they have zero experience in making. ARM in contrast they have experience with all the way back to Newton, and it has a nice licensing preposition.

I can't see them doing something different than ARM and x86. That would be an enormous undertaking to come up with an entirely new CPU architecture.

x86 really has nothing going for it architecture wise. It just has a market because Intel makes fast chips that run existing software. ARM is a better architecture, and Apple already has the toolchain to make software run on that architecture.

If you asked two equally competent chip makers to make a fast chip, and one was given x86 architecture and the other ARM, I am certain the ones who got ARM would win. x86 is just winning today because intel is filthy rich and can pour insane amount of money on x86 to make up for all this short comings.

> x86 really has nothing going for it architecture wise. It just has a market because Intel makes fast chips that run existing software.

People buy computers to run software. If they can't run their existing software on it, the computer has no value. Just like with the original PPC-to-Intel transition, where Apple provided a PPC emulator on Intel, if they go with ARM, Apple will have to provide Intel-to-ARM translation software in macOS for several years.

But now, a significant number people are using Macs as hosts for x86 Linux and Windows virtual machines. This changes the calculus a bit. It's one thing to emulate an ISA to run software in a user context; quite another to perform cross-ISA virtualization. QEMU can do the latter, but at a significant performance penalty.

It should also be noted that Apple is sitting on _much_ more cash than Intel. At the end of last year, Intel had $14B in cash on hand, while Apple had $285B.

"People buy computers to run software. If they can't run their existing software on it"

Obviously, but my point was that this mattered more in the past. Apple has so many tools and arrangements in place today to make a transition less painful. They got fat binaries and bundles. They got bitcode. They have really strong control over the app delivery process by having it all go through their app store. Almost everybody use xCode which they also control.

I can't remember ever running very much on PPC emulation on last transition. Usually I used fat binaries. Apple has been through so many of these transitions and gotten better at it every time. This will likely be quit smooth.

"But now, a significant number people are using Macs as hosts for x86 Linux and Windows virtual machines."

Really? I've been a Mac user since OSX came out and have very rarely encountered people who do that. I think this user group is too small for Apple to care. Anyway Linux should work fine, and I believe Windows also runs on ARM although not all software so I think this is not as big of an issue as you might think.

> I've been a Mac user since OSX came out and have very rarely encountered people who do that.

Are you a software developer developing for Linux targets? That describes nearly _all_ back-end development work done in the last 10+ years in SF and Silicon Valley.

> Linux should work fine, and I believe Windows also runs on ARM although not all software

Have you actually tried running ARM virtual machines on ARM hosts for these two environments? This can hardly be described as a mature art. If even remotely usable software exists today for this purpose, I'd love to see it.

Even if it did, the fact that developers usually target x86 builds (for deployment in the server clusters) makes this less useful than one might otherwise think.

Both Windows and Linux have ARM builds available. The emulation for legacy x86 Windows apps can happen inside the virtual machine.

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