3 ms·
Exactly. Apple’s strategy here is very clear: Offer customers iOS apps and games on the next MacBook as a straight swap for Boot Camp and Parallels. Once they
by headmelted 6y ago
Exactly. Apple’s strategy here is very clear:
Offer customers iOS apps and games on the next MacBook as a straight swap for Boot Camp and Parallels. Once they’ve moved everyone over to their own chips and brought back Rosetta and U/Bs they’re essentially free to replace whatever they like at the architecture level.
In their reveal I noticed that they only mentioned ARM binaries running in virtual environments. It makes sense if you don’t want to commit to supporting GNU tools natively on your devices (as it would mean sticking with an established ISA)
- saagarjha 6y agoI would be quite surprised if LLVM ever lost the ability to compile C for the platform.
- headmelted 6y agoExactly my point though. Apple is large enough that if they want to break from ARM in the future they can do so by forking an LLVM backend. That's not a large job if it's a very small change, but once it's been done once they have plenty of resources to provide ongoing support (like they do for webkit). The dividends of doing so are potentially massive. Given that they've been able to make really large gains with the A series chips to date on mobile (not least because they've been able to offload tasks to dedicated co-processors that general-purpose ARM cores don't ship with), the rewards for having chips that are a generation ahead of other like-for-like computers will outweigh the cost of maintaining the software.