I'm very curious to see this transition to ARM play out. There is a lot of software that will now be compiled for ARM that can potentially be used in open-source projects on much more cost-effective boards. Music (VST) plugins come to mind.
I understand power usage is a big concern these days, but I can't help but feel this aspect of arm is greatly overlooked and that the push towards arm devices is also partially inspired by the ability to lock down chip designs to a greater capacity than x86_64 chips.
Just look at the existing fragmentation among arm powered devices as is. I don't really like the thought of what an arm powered future could look like.
I really wish I could remember what video it was, but I remember years ago watching the ceo of arm present a new chip with built in emulation technology, that theoretically, would have allowed multiple operating systems to run at once or something. I remember the person talking to him asked if he forsaw this as the future, and he just laughed and said oh no, no manufacturers would never dream of allowing this and furthermore they'll likely use this technology to further specialize and lockdown their chips.
It may be personal bias, but since then and other things i've learned about arm, I've just had this lingering unease as to what them gaining dominance would mean to general computing.
So moving out of the x86/x86_64 world is really a no-brainer: why would all the electronic giants keep paying for x86 when they can get out of the de-facto duopoly? It seems that they are settling on ARM (Amazon Graviton, Fujitsu A64FX, Apple A12Z, etc.). It could have been another architecture, but it couldn't be x86_64.
On the other hand, there are other architectures besides ARM and x86: RISC-V, OpenSPARC, etc. Maybe one of these would be better for developers who don't want to deal with the ARM landscape fragmentation.
That used to be true, but I dont know how true it is now.
Once upon a time, ISA and ATA were both wired right to the bus.
By the P3/Athlon era everything was probably on a super-io controller and or south bridge, but that communication towards the northbridge/CPU was over PCI or ever fancier links.
But the clear cutting point to me is EFI. Most of the standards in how things communicate on older PCs was more based on the IBM BIOS. Early clones couldnt exist until that was nailed down. But... EFI replaces all of that with a new abstraction.
Note, however, that there's a lot of "quirks" and similar device-specific corrections for x86 as well. These get presented to Microsoft by the manufacturer, and Linux gets to reverse-engineer them.
I was aware of being able to have ex. u-boot pass a device tree file to the kernel at boot time; are you talking about that, or something more generic?
I don't disagree with you, but is that really a world developers or even consumers want? A world where each device manufacturer creates their own chip based around arm's processor designs that's incompatible with the next device's chip despite being virtually identical?
You're right, as a corporation looking to make money off all aspects of everything, it's a no brainer. For everyone else, it's a worse situation than the processor fragmentation of the 80's and early 90's.
X86_64, amd and intel, took advantage of the situation of the time and provided a somewhat standard, though controlled by them, processor design that allowed tons of individuals and companies to flourish. Moving to yet another highly controlled set of fragmented platforms is a step back to the 80's.
Ideally, we should be moving forward towards a system that provides a universal set of instructions licensable by all, without allowing licensees to restrict their implementations.
There's a lot of problems with our current paradigm but backpedaling to an even more controlled and fragmented platform is not the solution.
I really believe open hardware is a serious issue that's only starting to be addressed, meanwhile big established players are making their moves to stop it.
Arm is a big established player, one of the biggest, they may not be as forward facing as Microsoft or Apple or google, but damn does that company have a huge influence on everything.
Widely adopted open standards for hardware that does not encourage proprietary licences on basic chip design is a definite no brainer on the way forward.
The hurdles that need to be crossed though are greater than with software. Real tangible goods that require manufacturing require tons of overhead and complexity. This challenge is something I feel is the open source idealogy's next great obstacle and overcoming it will open computing so much more than even open source software has for the world. But, only if people has a whole come together and work towards it by not accepting anything less.
Your vision of an open ISA like RISC-V winning is something that I mainly see benefiting manufacturers making closed hardware, not people who want general purpose hardware for running general purpose operating systems. For example Western Digital and nvidia are going to be using RISC-V as part of every SSD/HDD and GPU, but we will not get to run our own code on them. There are also hardware vendors selling RISC-V microcontrollers, but nothing that could run Linux or BSD, even SiFive only has Arduino-level boards out (they had Linux-capable ones but don't seem to be making more of them for sale). Eventually there might be a RISC-V entry in the SBC market, but I think ARM is still going to own that market for a long time.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microchip/polarfire-soc-icicle-k...
I do appreciate that the x64 is more recent and will still be patented to heck - but there's only 3 more years until the first of those expire, methinks.
PAE for x86 means that programs needing more than 4GiB of main-memory can be run without needing a true 64-bit ISA - and PAE won't be patented anymore as that was introduced around 1995.
What I think is interesting is what this will do to the low-power x86 front, not just in terms of technical innovation but also availability. I'm perfect content building for x86, if it becomes as-available as the raspberry-pi class of devices ...
Apple has shown pretty clearly they see themselves as a consumer electronics and services company above all. If all the "professional" users who rely on Logic or FC or Apple in general jumped ship, Apple wouldn't likely notice it in their bottom line (loss of mindshare not withstanding). They have no vested interest in catering to these users and have produced hardware intended for them as an afterthought. The high cost of hardware and absence of middle tier products that make sense for these users is just icing on the cake.
"Professional" users of Logic or FC have little leverage to affect the course of Apple one way or another (unlike a more focused company whose business model is catering to these groups).
On the other hand Apple pro users do have a long history of being abused by the company so they might be alright with it in the end.
Anyway, I'd be looking for an out if I were them.
To a first approximation, Apple only cares about video producers, software developers, publishers, and musicians, in their Mac strategy. In approximately that order.
The only reason developers are on that list, is because XCode is how software gets written for the rest of their platforms; the dominance of Macs as personal workstations for Valley-style development is only a side effect of that.
These users provide a halo for everyone else. A college student might spend an extra $1000 on their laptop because they want to moonlight on some beats, or have a YouTube channel, that sort of thing.
I remember seeing this disconnect when the new Mac Pro was released and many here dismissed it as too expensive. Someone who works in CGI came around to say that, no, $50,000 is a normal amount of money to spend on their workstations and that their company was ecstatic to be able to keep working with macOS.
I’ve repeatedly found that the “Apple Tax” is at most something like $500: other companies tend to advertise configurations that I wouldn’t buy, and when I tweak them to match my requirements, their price is not notably different from a Mac
For Apple, not catering to every particular consumer whim/need out there is just smart business. But for the consumer, that is just another weakness of the mac ecosystem.
And of course the neglected "I just want internal drives or expansion cards" demographic. I;m not sure if the cheese grater design fixes it, but with the trashcan Mac Pro, there were plenty of configurations where the equivalent Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation was one clean self-contained box stuffed with PCI-e cards and SATA/SAS drives, and the Mac Pro was an angry squid of Thunderbolt, USB, and power cables to feed an array of external drives and devices.
I understand that their brand is based on seamless design and we-make-the-decisions-for-you presentation, but it feels like there'd be an opportunity for them to use a small-scale clone program as a market research tool.
Have it sell the form factors that Apple won't. The long-whined-for xMac. Units with servicable/cleanable designs for embedded markets. A mini-ITX Mac mainboard you can fit into existing kiosk/appliance designs. A rebranded Toughbook running MacOS. Something in a huge rackmount/server cube case that you can fit with a dozen internal drives. Frankly, I'd envision it as a wholly-owned operation, that charges over-the-odds prices. If people are still willing to put their money where their mouth is, they can claim epiphany and make an Apple version of the same design. If not, they can declare the business a failure, shutter it in a year, and start over next time they want to trial a product.
What's more the way they've handled their software (Logic, transition to FC X) doesn't seem like professional users are foremost on their mind.
You'd still be crazy to spend it on a Mac Pro unless you had very specific MacOS needs. Building a threadripper multi-Nvidia GPU PC is going to outperform it in any meaningful way with a modern CGI workflow.
OS starts to matter very little when it's a choice of seeing almost a finished image in almost real time which is what you get with CUDA backed rendering engines VS having to still chug away on CPU.
Both Linux and Windows still take a _lot_ more maintenance than macOS. If you have a room full of creative video artists, who are not techies, then you want them to have maximum productive up-time. You do not want to have to employ a small army of system support techies to keep those boxes running.
I used to work on a PC magazine in the West End of London. The mag was about Windows PCs, and was written on Windows PCs, but it was laid out on Macs. I supported both, and the servers and the network.
The PC side of things needed more than 10x as much support.
That's not materially different even today.
Secondly, it's not just about the boxes and their OS. It's also about the apps. A lovely fast sleek Linux distro is no use at all if it doesn't run the apps you need... and if those apps only run on one vendor's kit, or even just run best on that vendor's kit, then that is the kit you buy.
This isn't 20% faster, it's the difference between seeing the image in almost finished form and interacting with it with real time responsiveness vs having to wait minutes for an image. [1]
I know for certain that many VFX software companies aren't too happy about OpenGL being deprecated and Vulcan not being supported on recent MacOS releases.
IMO it's going to depend quite heavily on the demand for high-end VFX software on MacOS as to whether they bother with ARM ports if the MacPro does move over...
For what it's worth, there are 64-bit distros available for the Pi4. IIRC Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) has been fully 64-bit since the release of the 8GB model, and I know Ubuntu Server offered a 64-bit image for some time before that.
That is the sound from the internal speaker. The computers were also popular for MIDI control, even being chosen by professionals for this, though I can't find a video.
Kidding, but since you mentioned iPad...
Mac software will continue to rely on proprietary APIs. Software that didn't is most likely already ported.
There have been multiple attempts to build an x86-based VST host, over and over.
It will be about 1000x easier to do, if everyone builds for ARM.
However! ARM DSP/synthesis is fraught with minefields. One mans ARM is not a SHARC, etc.
It should be noted that there are already mainstream synth manufacturers shipping ARM platforms .. and there is no virulent unruly lunatic fringe like the synth lunatic fringe, btw.