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Comment by kilo_bravo_3 | Hacker News Reader

My hunch is that the ARM transition is coming sooner rather than later and instead of spending time and effort into rewriting a bunch of OS functions (like AirPlay Mirroring) to support AMD processors that lack Intel-only features like QuickSync, Apple is just going to drop the iOS pieces it has written for ARM64 into the MacOS (or whatever it's called) that runs on their upcoming ARM-based desktops and laptops.

I mean, I wouldn't re-write code to support hardware-accelerated video transcoding on Ryzen+GPU if I knew that in 2-3 years I was moving from x86-64 to ARM64.

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How well would Premiere or Photoshop run on ARM? How long would it take to rewrite these apps to run natively (i.e. with acceptable performance) on an ARM platform? Until you can do video/photo/audio editing faster w/ ARM using existing software products, I do not see it being viable as a replacement for x86 in any of Apple's higher-end products. Perhaps ARM is included for sake of mobile development, but with 32+ modern x86 cores you could just as well emulate ARM and barely feel any overhead.

Sure, there are a lot of neat tricks ARM can do with special instructions and hardware accelerators in very well controlled use cases. But, for the average creative professional who doesnt have time or patience to play with hyper-optimizing their workflow, having an x86 monster that can chew through any arbitrary workload (optimized or otherwise) is going to provide the best experience for the foreseeable future.

Apple has dragged Photoshop kicking and screaming onto different platforms and even OS’ before. If they succeeded when they were nearly dead (OS X Cocoa timeframe) they will have no problems doing it now.

Like sibling comment says, it's not exactly the first cpu transition for Photoshop...

> Photoshop 1

> Photoshop 1 (1990.01) requires a 8 MHz or faster Mac with a color screen and at least 2 MB of RAM. The first release of Photoshop was successful despite some bugs, which were fixed in subsequent updates. Most users ended up using version 1.07. Photoshop was marketed as a tool for the average user, which was reflected in the price ($1,000 compared to competitor Letraset’s ColorStudio, which cost $1,995).

> Photoshop 1.x requires Mac System 6.0.3, 2 MB of RAM, a 68000 processor, and a floppy drive.

Source: https://lowendmac.com/2013/photoshop-for-mac-faq/

They are rewriting all those Apps on iPad OS anyway, which is where many of the professionals are moving towards. It is the same with Autodesk, their CEO said he doesn't know how well iPad Sales are doing, but he clearly sees a trend of more pros moving to iPad. They are everywhere in their industry.

(Unfortunately I can no longer google the link of the video)

Which is not to say they will move to ARM. I am still skeptical of it.

> to support AMD processors that lack Intel-only features like QuickSync

QuickSync is only just a Hardware Video Encoder. Which AMD has as well, it is called VCN [1]. Not to mention Apple hasn't been using QuickSync for as long as they have been shipping T2, where Apple uses their own Video Encoder within T2. ( T2 is just a rebadged A10 )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next

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