Ask HN: Will Apple M1 mean better support for Raspberry Pi?
With Firefox and chrome m1 releases do we think it will mean more updated builds for raspberry pi as well?
For macOS, the support revolves around Xcode. Cross-compilation support is Apple-specific and won't benefit Linux. CPU architecture is abstracted away in macOS as much as possible, so average developers won't think much about ARM support.
Where Apple wants developers to tune for M1 specifically, is their proprietary frameworks for ML acceleration and Metal, which don't benefit anyone but Apple.
At best there may be some halo effect from proving that ARM can be as fast as "real" desktop CPUs, and it's not just the low-end slow Qualcomm chips. That might legitimize running ARM on servers, but Pi is neither high-end desktop nor a server platform.
I don't see 2a happening, and let's hope for 1a and time.
Surely the Linux kernel does not support these things now, but there's only baseless speculation that Apple would actively lock this down.
> They are slowly but surely moving towards not being apple to run anything not Apple on OSX as well.
I would argue that both of these statements are completely baseless, and the second is actually actively argued against by Apple.
I'll be the first to say that their handling of iOS things is horrible, and I would buy iPhones and iPads if they were a more open platform, but the world is more complicated than "Apple is evil" and their handling of iOS has no bearing on the Mac.
In my view you can only believe Apple will lock down the Mac if you somehow view them as an irrational ideological opponent, not simply a company that wants to make money by selling computers. Since you say you don't care what Apple themselves say towards this, I can't escape the impression that you might actually already view them in this way. If so, there's not much we can talk about.
I really would love nothing more then buy the new Apple Arm Macbook Pro but I can't risk investing in this ecosystem when, to me, it's quite obvious where Apple stands on this.
> I rather watch their actions.
And which actions are those? Gatekeeper and the Apple T2 are not enough to make the Mac not an "open computing platform", let alone something close to iOS. I'd argue they're not even on the way there, just like Windows SmartScreen isn't on the way there. And note that the T2 is even gone from Apple Silicon Macs.
Apple deserves all the added scrutiny in this area because of their attitude on iOS [1]. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that Apple's direction towards locking down Macs is either "clear" or "inevitable" in my view.
[1]: There are some identifiable explanations as to why iOS is so locked down whereas the Mac isn't, but let's talk about that some other time.
If everything works exactly like iOS you save $$$$$$$, added benefits you can charge enterprise licensing fees to get access to your sdks and dev tools. And if you have e.g. a luxury market cornered you can command those sorts of prices.
This is exactly Apple's playbook, I don't know why anyone would expect them to do anything different...
Not as the primary boot OS, perhaps, but it will work under virtualization. The M1 chip supports virtualization, and Apple has a new hypervisor API in Big Sur:
1b and device drivers seem to me like the biggest obstacles.
As far as I know there Linux driver support for Intel Macs is abysmal, due to lack of support from Apple.
I would be shocked if ARM Macs, which will probably be even more locked down, were more open somehow.
I don't understand why you think Apple specific components matter, surely Linux developers will ignore those and focus on the cpu side.
It'd be awesome if Apple would let Raspberry Pi use their M1 chips, but clearly that's never going to happen!
What could be very interesting though is emulating a Pi on an M1 Mac in virtualisation.
I just switched to the starship shell prompt on my mac, for example, and I tried to install it on my Pi as well, but there's no prebuilt binary for Pi, and after an hour or so I gave up trying to build it myself. :P
Will Apples move to Intel mean better support for the PC?
Answer: No.
What? Plenty of open source software already builds on Arm.
Honestly, it feels like people here forgot that Arm is a processor architecture that has been around since 1985. Apple just happened to put one in their computer 35 years later.
They wont find anything of interest. The M1 is just a well designed low power mid-performance tier chip. There's no magic when you compare a power efficient arm chip to an x86 chip in the same class.
And don't forget that apple has a closed ecosystem so they can build whatever the hell they want without worrying about the technical inertia and legacy baggage the PC platform as a whole is completely built upon.
I imagine the hackers of tomorrow will reverse engineer the M1 for the same reason they reverse engineer the chips of yesterday - nostalgia. In any case this will be an interesting note in computing history.
They beefed up core caches a bunch, which likely has a lot more to do with the speedups than any special silicon tricks...
People are also ignoring that they have a lot of software infrastructure based around virtualization and auto optimization...its like if the JVM was running at kernel level on a jvm optimized chip with days to perform optimization...of course you would expect that to be blazing fast. Compared to the horror show in Intel land where you have to compile in special support for advanced instructions...
Also, for a large number of these devices, they run Java-ish code on a Java-ish VM.
Can they make an Air competitor? As far as I understand, not today.
But they do support clang.
Even if it does work, there'd be little use in it. Hackintoshes are popular because they offer performance beyond what you can buy for a reasonable price as a consumer. Alternative ARM devices are nowhere near as fast as M1, so that use case disappears completely.
There's also the bootloader issue. On x86 and x64 the boot process has been standardized into either BIOS or UEFI mode. On ARM there are standards comparable to UEFI, but most chip vendors have their own custom bootloader code to boot an OS. Most chipsets are compatible with Android or Linux but there's only one manufacturer who develops bootloaders for the macOS platform.
Of course, this will apply to VMs only (for now at least). https://alephsecurity.com/2019/06/17/xnu-qemu-arm64-1/ was a good starting point for me.
Apple have ARM IP for instructions. So Apple Silicon is 100% ARM compatible.
They can only be used in Accelerate.framework or in the kernel, which checks and is able to work without them.
Where I think it's a game-changer is in Docker images. A lot of projects only build x86_64 images, M1 means they'll build ARM images as well
Virtualization tools and host OSes will probably see a huge boost in ARM support as well, but the Raspberry Pi is a bit too limited to really take advantage of these improvements.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/11/25/benchmark-x86-boards...
A side-effect of the above is that the projects will also support other ARM-based chipsets, such as Raspberry Pi's
It's just another example of why non-portable code is silly.
So - before M1 announce ARM market was reserved for battery devices when huge limitation is power for them. Performance was important, but most important is power consumption.
There was also some niche server-side ARM like Marvell ThunderX, Qualcomm Centriq or Amazon Graviton.
Actually Apple acquire P.A. Semi company in 2008 and before that they're known for PWRficient processors.
Now M1 release shock whole industry.
First PC manufacturers like Dell or HP - but for now they're tied with vendors as Intel and Microsoft. Second Cloud operators like Digital Ocean and Google - only Amazon have their own ARM CPU. Third OS vendors like Microsoft - they're having a Windows RT in past and need to revive it ASAP. Forth are CPU vendors like Intel, AMD that providing x86 and Broadcom, Qualcomm that are ARM - because first can seen how their x86 product line is outperform from ARM products. And other can seen how even their top ARM products are outperform from niche player as Apple.
In result - expect shortly a HUGE investments in post-x86 for different chips architectures and as result RPi will be improvement. But not today!
PS: Do you remember Russian CPU Elbrus? It's VLIW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk