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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> Besides, Hackintoshes are often built when Apple’s own hardware isn’t fast enough; in this case, Apple’s ARM processors are already some of the fastest in the industry.

They are also used when one wants more cores than are possible on Apple hardware. If you want a build engine for a medium to large sized compiled language project, Apple has no options that make economic sense, since a Ryzen Threadripper will beat everything else hands down. The same is true of every other embarrassingly parallel, linearly-scaling compute problem.

In such cases, the "speed" of Apple's own silicon doesn't help at all.

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Hackintoshes from my experience are usually built as a low cost hobbyist alternative. Most people earning a living from a Mac will sacrifice speed to have stability and support.

Plenty of people who want MacOS but cannot afford the official Mac will use it instead.

I need to build my software for macOS. On my Ryzen Threadripper running Linux, I can run a faster, more powerful KVM/QEMU version of Mojave than I can buy from Apple, while still having cores and RAM left for Linux.

I could afford to buy hardware from Apple, but why would I when the cost/performance ratio for an embarrasingly parallel compute task like compiling is so much worse?

Like the previous person said, mainly stability and support. There's no doubt that macOS can run much faster in non-Apple hardware given certain parameters, but if you want support and solid stability you would probably go with Mac hardware.

I remember seeing a build on the tonymacx86 forums where someone built a Hackintosh with 64 cores (dual Xeons, I believe) and 128 GB of RAM - back in 2010. What you'd do with such a beast, I don't know, but that's well above and beyond any hardware Apple has ever sold.

This speed advantage won’t apply when emulating Apple silicon on an x86-64 CPU, as discussed here.

Emulating ARM on x86-64 is doable, but it has dramatically more overhead. It’s doubtful that a high core count would be enough to overcome this relative to just using Apple silicon.

My point was that the best use of hackintosh/VM tech is unrelated to "speed advantage". Apple has nothing that can touch a Threadripper for linearly scaled parallel workflows. The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost, though that wasn't what I was suggesting.

> The gap is so big that it might even overcome the arm/x86-64 emulation cost

I've spent a lot of time on this. With QEMU, the performance gap is huge right now.

I have several ARM/QEMU virtual machines running on my AMD virtualization server, but the emulation overhead makes everything painfully slow, even when assigning 20+ cores to the VM. I picked up an 8GB Raspberry Pi because it's often faster to run a workload on the Raspberry Pi than even the many-core AMD emulated system.

The emulation overhead across architectures is huge with QEMU.

Is it not the case that x86 Chromebooks emulate the ARM ISA in order to run Android apps? There's certainly a slowdown but it's not horrible. How do they do it?

Then again maybe they just have a good JVM and that solves most of the problem for Android apps?

I feel really stupid, because as the (otherwise happy) owner of a well-specced x86 Chromebook, I've always wondered why most people seemed happy with android apps on chromeOS while I find them laggy and buggy messes. I've just realized it's probably an emulation issue.

So, uh, the slowdown seems pretty bad to me.

Let’s wait the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. I think they are all in on this fastest chip race thing, with deep pockets, high paying customers and scale behind them.

I'm actually excited to learn that they're going to build small Mac Pro. That could finally be Mac I would buy, if they wouldn't go crazy with prices.

That's a rumor, but yes, it's exciting.

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