Thoughts on Apple Silicon (ARM)

So as I predicted 4 years ago, Apple is finally releasing ARM based Macs, or as they like to say, Macs with Apple Silicon.

So what are some interesting takeaways from this announcement? They are doing this transition very similar to how I remember the transition from PowerPC to intel happened.

We had universal binaries, which mean executable files would contain both PowerPC and intel machine code. Same deal today only with intel and ARM machine code, and renamed to Universal 2.

Rosetta is back as Rosetta 2. The original one was basically an emulator. Rosetta 2 in contrast is quite interesting in that it translates intel code to ARM code upon installation. This actually sounds quite impressive. So even without developers specifically recompiling their apps for Universal 2, you can run old apps made for intel Macs on your new ARM based Macs with close to native performance. That is pretty cool.

One of the worries has been whether an ARM based Mac will be fast enought. I saw many people speculating that as it stands now ARM would not be fast enought for 4K video editing. Judging by their demos where they ran several 4K streams and applied filters in real time, such speak is nonsense.

The way they positioned themselves in this talk, it seems Apple is very confident that they can deliver high performance with ARM. The world fastest computer (june, 2020) actually runs on ARM processors.