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Are Apple ARM chips the same as other ARM chips or are there any "magic" that requires more work for developer to port software?
by butz 6y ago
Are Apple ARM chips the same as other ARM chips or are there any "magic" that requires more work for developer to port software?
- baddox 6y agoApple licenses the ARM CPU architecture from Arm Holdings. My understanding is that Arm Holdings doesn't sell any hardware themselves.
- floatboth 6y agoArm sells both ISA licenses (which is what Apple has) that allow you to make a fully custom microarchitecture, and pre-made cores (which is what e.g. AWS has, along with all the little embedded SoC manufacturers). But yeah, they don't really sell physical hardware.
- jarfil 6y agoThey will likely have some Apple specific features, but I doubt they'd want to make them incompatible to the point of requiring a software rewrite compared to other ARM chips. Just recompile your stuff, jump through whatever hoops you need to publish it, and that should be it.
- saagarjha 6y agoGoing by their iPhone chips: nothing special to worry about, other than page sizes which may not be an issue in the future depending on how Rosetta 2 works on their actual shipping hardware. There are some proprietary MSRs but they’re not for your use ;)
- squarefoot 6y agoPure speculation on my part, but I think Apple wouldn't want people installing either other OSes on their machines or their OS on other hardware, so I would expect some lock-in hardware/firmware/software to make impossible or really difficult to build ARM hackintoshes and the other way around. Hoping to be wrong, though.
- saagarjha 6y agoI hope so, too!
- doctor_eval 6y agoIn his interview with Gruber, Federighi explicitly said that they wanted hobbyists and hackers to be able to play with the Mac hardware, so it would be possible to boot other OSen. Don’t have a link right now, but it was clear that he was saying that the platform would be hackable. Proof will be in the pudding of course.
- skavi 6y agoApple chips have one custom extension (AMX), but IIRC, they don't give third party developers access to this, so from a developer's perspective it's a standard ARMv8 chip.