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Comment by wonderlg | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t Apple already include an ARM chip in MacBooks with the Touch Bar?

I have three feelings:

1. Apple will just enable the existing chips “today” and developers can ship ARM code to a sizable audience, with instant battery benefits.

2. Cheaper Macs will start dropping x64 next year and continue running only ARM code, maybe emulating x64 like Rosetta.

3. Pros will keep having both processors for the foreseeable future, similarly to how they have “dual graphics”, except that the OS will always run on ARM.

We should keep in mind that Apple just dropped a swath of 32-bit software which means they aren’t afraid to do it again.

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There is a legal slowdown for emulating x86 (and x86_64 I beleive), because of Intel patents. That's why Microsoft's first attempt to ARM was such a disaster, with no compatibility with Windows' huge ecosystem. That's why there is no commercial toolsuit who offers x86 compatibility on other architectures.

But maybe the situation has evolve ? Expired patents or a deal between Apple and Intel ?

It’s a nice theory but the the Touch Bar CPU specs are pretty well known at this point - if Apple had wanted to do this they would have designed the system differently.

Supporting a different ISA on the same OS/Runtime is relatively “easy” in 2020 and doesn’t need such a sophisticated strategy - for 99 percent of developers this is going to be a one click recompile to different build target in their IDE. Push new binaries to App Store and done.

By “easy” I mean relative to how ISA transitions have been managed in past. Apple are so big now that runtime mechanisms for x86 code, such as Rosetta during the PowerPC to x86 migration or hardware emulation on the 68k etc, just aren’t necessary this time around IMO. People will recompile. For sure we will lose some software that is too old to be recompiled by long lost authors, but I don’t think Apple cares. They already just killed 32bit app support with similar consequences.

Remember today that your “arm” iOS apps work just fine in your x86-based iOS simulator in Xcode on an intel Mac, so access to actual ARM hardware isn’t a significant barrier at all to development for most.

Indeed this would be the fourth time they successfully switched architectures. They went from m68k, to PPC, to x86. Apple is in a pretty unique position in that they make both their hardware and software ecosystem. It gives them a lot of flexibility that companies who just make generic Wintel systems lack.

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