Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

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“Apple’s own pro apps will be updated to support the company’s new silicon in macOS Big Sur, and the company is hoping developers will update their apps. “The vast majority of developers can get their apps up and running in a matter of days,” claims Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. []...

Microsoft is working on Office updates for the new Mac silicon, and Word and Excel are already running natively on the new Mac processors, with PowerPoint even using Apple’s Metal tech for rendering. Apple has also been working with Adobe to get these pro apps up and running on these new chips.“

So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash”

Great, customer focused, and completely altruistic move back in the days when they killed Nvidia cards on high-performance rendering and simulation machines (and everywhere else).

So, Apple has performance libraries that are better than what Intel has to offer? So, cross-platform applications are now again “passe”?

I don’t use my iPhone for working. Why would I want iOS Apps on my computer? So I can install Apple Mail instead of Outlook

> So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash”

Did you miss the part where there’s going to be a “Rosetta 2” AOT/JIT translation layer?

You are aware that you will (most likely) lose all those pretty amazing optimisations that you tend to rely on if you develop software that is a bit more “sophisticated” (e.g., parallel programming leveraging IPP etc.). Can’t wait to see how fast that translation layer will be for my FFTs that have been super optimised for Intel chips.

I wonder: when I observed 20+% performance loss for high compute intensive scientific tasks Intel vs. AMD because I relied on IPP - how much performance loss will we see for the x86 to Arm?

For your average Text application you may not care about performance loss. But I bet you, that for video, image editing, science etc. you are easily 20+% worse off than before.

So what exactly is the benefit for the customer or the developer community?

So I can play Angry birds on my Mac?

I mostly worry about software that will never receive an update. I'm sure the tools you listed will be ported over to ARM simply because it means vendors can sell them again to the same customer.

Customers do not tend to be willing to pay for updates that “merely ensure compatibility with their new OS” ;-)

Especially not corporations :)

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