Thanks for the insights on the AMD/VIA/Intel triumvirate. It’s such an odd model that x86 has landed on. > Apple could take this route to build an ARM based pr

Thanks for the insights on the AMD/VIA/Intel triumvirate. It’s such an odd model that x86 has landed on. > Apple could take this route to build an ARM based processor that had sufficient x86_64 helpers to speed things up enough that the translation/emulation performance was negligible Totally agree, this is exactly what I thought when I read the story. There’s a lot of transistor budget these days for special hardware, especially in a larger / more power-hungry part that is substituting for something quite expensive (Intel chips). Mac’s role as the heavy-lifter in Apple’s ecosystem means it has different trade-offs to consider, and my guess is that definitely points to a JIT or compatibility layer for legacy x86 apps. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be worth the effort unless it could be reasonably performant, which means silicon. The optics would be really bad if they launch a platform transition and it was less than ~75% of last year’s computer. With that said, they’ll be pushing hard for app developers to transition over, and might throw away that compatibility silicon after a few years. It’s a really cool thing to be your own chipmaker and have the levers that Apple does in this situation to add compatibility silicon and not just accept another architecture’s limitations.