Unlike a dev board, Mac caters to professional audience. Apart from iOS apps, Several professional x86 software needs to be ported to ARM before ARM Mac becomes a reality.
Sure, performance won't be as good as native, but it'll be good enough to introduce ARM Macs.
If they don't have a way to emulate x86 chips, I don't see them introducing ARM Macs.
On a side note, I wonder about the patent dynamics regarding x86 & x86-64 emulation.
When Microsoft & Qualcomm announced snapdragon powered Windows 10, intel gave a 'not-so-subtle' threat to Qualcomm regarding patents for x86 emulation[1]. MS, still released the model anyways.
I guess, Apple has enough leverage to negotiate patents for x86(intel),x86_64(AMD) emulation.
(Questionable if that's true.)
Did you mean to post a reference?
1. They don't need to pay licenses per core, so they can put 48, 96 cores in a single machine.
2. Is ARM as powerful as Intel, of course not, but who cares? ARM is more efficient so just add more cores to it.
3.Apple already owns all development stack. They already created hardware emulators for previous chip changes. They will do it again.
> so just add more cores to it.
Oh my...thermals. I don't know where to begin. Scaling cores (even if they're efficient) poses many challenges - thermal, core-to-core bandwidth, interposer design issues and warpage, and most importantly, yield as the die size gets larger. Or you'd have to break up the core dice into many die and create fabric such as what AMD Epyc server chips are doing, etc...etc. A 96 core die with decent power envelope would be in the order of 300-500 watts.
While this is true, the iPad Pro is the key. If Apple can continue to get pro apps ported to the pro they will have many already moved to ARM by the time a full machine comes out. See many Adobe apps already out or in progress.
Who?