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Comment by std_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

They are supposedly not directly x86 compatible and thus will need to emulate it at a performance penalty. Not something you'd want in a "pro" machine.

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I don't see that as the major problem. It seems like they could rely on third parties to have them ported in a matter of a few months.

I'm more doubtful of their ability to produce something sufficiently competitive.

Even if they were fast enough you would still want to launch those chips on less performance critical machines first and give the pro apps plenty of time to update before migrating the pro hardware.

Usually consumer software moves faster to adopt new tech stacks anyway. OS X supported x86-64 in v10.5 in 2007, but Photoshop didn’t go 64-bit on Mac until 2010 with CS5.

My best guess is that it’s because big pro applications have a mess of dependencies and some inner guts in the high performance code where it drops to assembly. Building that for alternate architectures isn’t as simple as checking a box in Xcode.

Critical software or drivers may not be supported any longer. Source may not be available.

If going from almost a standing start to fabing chips that compete on par with intel was that easy some one else (elon musk or china) would have done it already.

I am sure major shareholders of apple will not want to bankroll a 7nm fab and the massive massive costs in producing a competitor to AMD and INTEL

I completely agree with that. Actually building pro-quality chips that compete with top end Intel chips is really hard and is likely more of a bottleneck than 3rd party software.

I really still have a lot of doubts about this idea that they will even try it. It doesn't seem that there is really anything in it for them in doing this.

Mate, AMD themselves are already fabless. Apple uses suppliers. Apple makes their mobile SoCs already. This is feasible.

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