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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

If Apple doesn't provide some form of acceleration or support for x86 hypervisors I can see this leading to mass exodus of the Mac platform for web developers. It will be interesting to see what Apple does.

Given the technological steps Apple has made, it seems like it is only a matter of if, not when Apple will switch over some computers.

I personally would predict the Macbook Air (potentially a new Macbook), Mac Mini, iMac and potentially the iMac Pro will switch over to Arm first. It seems like a poor risk/return ratio to switch the Macbook Pro and Mac Pro lines to Arm at this point in time. Who knows what the manufacturing yield will be on the initial 5nm chips.

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> I can see this leading to mass exodus of the Mac platform for web developers.

Why _web_ developers?

I'd have thought that web developers would be some of the last developers to abandon Macs due to a change in architecture given that lots of web development is done in scripting languages which would need minimal support to move architecture, and the fact that Apple's ARM chips tend to perform well in JS benchmarks.

I'd expect that it would be system software engineers working in languages like C/C++ who would abandon the platform given that the majority of their tools and libraries may need extensive porting work.

web development has close relationship with graphics, either creation of graphics, or consumption. The latter category require the rich ecosystem of apps on the Mac platform.

Linux is a poor option in this regard.

Many web developers still need to test Windows-only versions of IE and Edge.

Windows 10 now supports ARM64. I don't know if it includes IE, though.

I think there were some Win8 IE builds for ARM but I don’t think the full range of versions people target is available

Yeah they had IE for ARM because of the Surface RT, I believe

Web developers frequently use Docker for Mac which is a way to run Linux containers (which are most frequently built for x86-64), which requires a way to run a x86-64 hypervisor.

Docker for Mac runs a Linux VM that in turn runs the containers running on developers laptops.

Doesn’t this answer your own question though, the Docker vm is just virtualized to x86 and that’s it?

Virtualization ≠ emulation, for purely cpu-bound tasks performance can be near-native as long as the underlying processor architecture is the same. Not so if you're emulating x86 on ARM...

It's virtualized for the same architecture, which is not very costly on today's CPUs. ARM emulating x86 is a whole different beast.

On the other hand, why not run arm-docker on a virtual arm-linux?? Why does it have to be x86?

Last time Apple did this (PPC -> x86), the new Intel CPUs were so much faster & more efficient than the equivalent PPC chip that programs ran at the same speed under emulation, and the system & native programs ran much faster, so it was still a worthy upgrade.

For power efficiency this may be true this time as well... but for sheer performance and latency under spiky web-style workflows, I'm not hopeful.

Probably alluding to the current web developer love of Docker.

Not just docker, any virtual environment. If I'm deploying to a VM on Linode, its x86. Unless you are serving static content, you want your dev environment as near as possible to your server.

I think web developers will be just fine. I am more worried for people who use complex software such as CAD, music software or even Adobe suites.

Porting to ARM is not impossible, but it's an additional cost they have to deal with.

it's so lame that they removed 32bit app support via a OS update (I can't use a lot of the software I enjoyed OR go backwards) and are now doing this... like if you're going to switch architectures anyway at least let me run the damn software I was able to before the update it feels like no one can make up their minds over there

overall I see how moving to ARM is a good move, but it's so annoying at the same time especially since they just fixed up the mbps which drove a lot of people to buy them (including me) I feel more burned than excited wouldn't surprised if the same folks who greenlit the butterfly keyboards were behind this

I suspect they are removing 32-bit support now to ease the transition rather than doing everything at once. In a few years the pain of Catalina will have faded (somewhat) and presumably they'll only have to worry about backward compatibility with AMD64.

That’s exactly what the article says. It’s a slow transition starting with lower end MacBooks

Will ARM ever be able to emulate multithreaded x64 fast? ARM has a relaxed memory model that would cause issues.

Be interesting to see if some cloud players start migrating workload to ARM as well in the future. Apple has a knack for pricking up on trends a bit early or creating them. I think iOS really kicked of ARM / smartphone market share.

AWS has released Graviton2-based EC2 instances[0] with excellent performance[1]. It seems like a lot of workloads can be moved to ARM-based VMs with little fuss.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-m6g-ec2-instances-power... [1]: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/observations-on-arm64-awss-ama...

I think the phone market was already entirely ARM when Apple joined the party.

You are probably thinking of 64-bit ARM, which Apple was very early to use.

Actually - Apple drove the smartphone market with ARM.

The iMac Pro currently uses some pretty high-powered x86 processors, so I have a hard time imagining that will switch over soon. The others though seem reasonable.

Have you seen the benchmarks between the iMac Pro and the chips in the recent iPads Pro?

Now take away the space, power, and heat constraints of the iPad Pro.

Edit: wow, this touched a nerve and got downvoted into oblivion. Well, here's a benchmark for the latest iPad Pro:

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/58

And the iMac Pro:

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/imac-pro-late-2017

The single-core scores are about equal -- even though the iMac Pro is averaging a higher clock rate.

And at 18 cores, the iMac Pro trounces the iPad Pro's 8 cores, but again, heat and space constraints.

An interesting argument, but even if the 8-core iPad processor could achieve somewhat higher performance without thermal/power constraints, it's nowhere near enough to bridge that multi-core score performance gap.

Adding more cores isn't necessarily an option for Apple yet either, considering that (from what I understand) their yields are relatively low because it's hard to make chips that large on such a small node. Even more cores means lower yields and greater costs.

I'm not saying the iMac Pro won't get there, but I highly doubt it will be a part of this first wave.

Mac sales are a drop in the bucket compared to iPhones and iPads, and I strongly suspect they will share a chip family. Yields should be the least of our concern.

The problem is the larger the chip, the lower the yield. High end desktop/server chips are much bigger than mobile chips.

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