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Apple has had success switching micro architectures twice now because 1. they write a performant translator to run old apps on the new chips 2. they move to a

Apple has had success switching micro architectures twice now because 1. they write a performant translator to run old apps on the new chips 2. they move to a faster processor On the non-apple front, Qualcomm isn’t making faster chips than Intel or AMD; even the best translators are going to be very slow running legacy apps

jonhohle 3y ago
Apple also had an earlier transition from Motorola 68K to PowerPC.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The current line of Mac OS has its roots in NeXTSTEP which started on a Motorola 68030 with MMU, and then also ran on HP PA-RISC, SPARC and Intel 386. When Apple later transitioned from PowerPC to x86, it was rumoured that they had been maintaining the x86 port all along.
  - minimaul 3y ago
    https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr... Is very interesting reading on the x86 port of Mac OS.
addicted 3y ago
It’s also important to recognize that Apple transitions after their current processors are, intentionally or unintentionally, far behind the state of the art in processor power. When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. In this case it wasn’t deliberate. But when it transitioned from Intel to ARM, Apple was again way behind on performance compared to contemporary competitors, making the transition look better than if it was up to date. If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. But they weren’t so it looked like an increase in performance along with an increase in battery life, which made the transition a no brainer for Apple. And they were able to do this because they tightly couple their OS with the hardware, so they can control the transition without having, say Acer stick macOS on a laptop that makes the M1 not look as great as the previous Apple Intel Mac.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. Apple transitioned after it became obvious that consumers were starting to prefer laptops over desktops, and Power PC (as well as Pentium IV) chips had problems with both power draw and heat. As soon as Intel transitioned to Core, Apple transitioned to Intel. Apple transitioned to ARM after Intel ran into the same issues with power draw and heat again,
- dagmx 3y ago
  In what way were Apple behind on performance at the end of the Intel era? They were shipping the same chips as everyone else and were getting similar performance and battery benchmarks as other brands (Dell, HP) in that same generation of processor.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    Power PC led on floating point performance and Intel led on integer performance. Since printing and graphics were one of Apple's largest markets, they were better positioned in that market with good floating point performance. It's also the reason that Apple showed off Mac vs. PC Photoshop performance so frequently in that time period.
- wtallis 3y ago
  > If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. The M1 launched two months after the first Intel Tiger Lake processors, so Apple was pretty much on-time for moving the 13" MacBook Pro off of Intel's Ice Lake, and it wasn't behind on performance: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-vs-apple-m1#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-v... The larger MacBook Pro was later moving off Intel and was using a very old (2.5 years) Intel CPU at the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched, but even comparing against the CPUs Intel had at the time for machines of that class, the M1 Pro's performance looks fine: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-vs-apple-m1-pro#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-v... And it's important to note that Intel themselves were largely to blame for the fact that the larger MacBook Pro was still using a 2.5 year old CPU: Intel never shipped Ice Lake processors for desktop or high-power mobile, so the Coffee Lake Refresh processors didn't have a successor from Intel until five months before the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched.
GeekyBear 3y ago
It's worth remembering that Apple was testing ARM Macs a decade ago. They waited until they had CPU performance that was good enough to run emulated x86 software to pull the trigger. I'd add a point three to the above: Apple's own in-house software was ready to go when they launched the new chip.
dagaci 3y ago
As with Apple, Qualcomm claims so be faster than x86. This is true on the synthetic single core Geekbench benchmark compared to a 2019 Intel cpu. Today the Qualcomm beats the m3 in Geek-bench and the current amd 7940hs. But for real applications the 7940Hs, beats the Qualcomm even on Cinnebench Single core and multicore
- lostmsu 3y ago
  Which Qualcomm beats M3 in Geekbench?
- fh9302 3y ago
  Snapdragon X Elite does not beat the M3 in single-core. It does beat the M3 in multi-core because of the 12 high performance cores, compared to 4 in the M3. It's more of a M3 Pro competitor.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  The problem you'll have with "real applications" is that they're written for amd64 or x86, and Qualcom's translator isn't exactly competitive. They're going to need Rosetta-like translation performance to beat Intel. Which also begs the question: do modern Qualcoms even come with native 32 bit support? Unlike amd64, aarch64 has no 32 bit compatibility guarantees. On Linux the situation will be very different. That's why I hope they release these devices for relatively cheap (because most applications and games will be quite slow) so Linux users can get good perf out of them for almost all native tools while Windows userspace catches up.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    They don't need native 32 bit ARM Windows support. That's essentially dead and never really took off to begin with, it's a handful of ancient apps in the Windows Store from the Surface RT days. Microsoft has already said they're removing it from the next version of Windows. x86 support will still be kicking around on Windows on ARM64 which is by far the bulk of 32 bit Windows programs. Microsoft's compatibility layers are pretty competitive. You get about 60% of the performance whereas Rosetta 2 is closer to 70%, which is impressive when you consider MS has no hardware bits to do that unlike Apple. What has been more of an issue is the slow CPUs themselves. The upcoming Orion chips should perform similarly to M1 on x86 programs.
hulitu 3y ago
> Apple has had success switching micro architectures twice now because 3. They also ported the only apps who ran on Macs. When Adobe, Autodesk, PTC, Cadence and so on, will have their programs ported to ARM, then yes, Windows will run on ARM.

jonhohle 3y ago

Apple also had an earlier transition from Motorola 68K to PowerPC.

Findecanor 3y ago
The current line of Mac OS has its roots in NeXTSTEP which started on a Motorola 68030 with MMU, and then also ran on HP PA-RISC, SPARC and Intel 386. When Apple later transitioned from PowerPC to x86, it was rumoured that they had been maintaining the x86 port all along.
- minimaul 3y ago
  https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr... Is very interesting reading on the x86 port of Mac OS.

addicted 3y ago

It’s also important to recognize that Apple transitions after their current processors are, intentionally or unintentionally, far behind the state of the art in processor power. When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. In this case it wasn’t deliberate. But when it transitioned from Intel to ARM, Apple was again way behind on performance compared to contemporary competitors, making the transition look better than if it was up to date. If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. But they weren’t so it looked like an increase in performance along with an increase in battery life, which made the transition a no brainer for Apple. And they were able to do this because they tightly couple their OS with the hardware, so they can control the transition without having, say Acer stick macOS on a laptop that makes the M1 not look as great as the previous Apple Intel Mac.

GeekyBear 3y ago
> When Apple transitioned to Intel the PowerPC platform was way behind on a performance basis. Apple transitioned after it became obvious that consumers were starting to prefer laptops over desktops, and Power PC (as well as Pentium IV) chips had problems with both power draw and heat. As soon as Intel transitioned to Core, Apple transitioned to Intel. Apple transitioned to ARM after Intel ran into the same issues with power draw and heat again,
dagmx 3y ago
In what way were Apple behind on performance at the end of the Intel era? They were shipping the same chips as everyone else and were getting similar performance and battery benchmarks as other brands (Dell, HP) in that same generation of processor.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  Power PC led on floating point performance and Intel led on integer performance. Since printing and graphics were one of Apple's largest markets, they were better positioned in that market with good floating point performance. It's also the reason that Apple showed off Mac vs. PC Photoshop performance so frequently in that time period.
wtallis 3y ago
> If Apple had been at the forefront of Intel CPUs, the transition would have looked like a slight loss in performance for tremendous increases in battery life which most would have been happy with. The M1 launched two months after the first Intel Tiger Lake processors, so Apple was pretty much on-time for moving the 13" MacBook Pro off of Intel's Ice Lake, and it wasn't behind on performance: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-vs-apple-m1#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1185g7-v... The larger MacBook Pro was later moving off Intel and was using a very old (2.5 years) Intel CPU at the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched, but even comparing against the CPUs Intel had at the time for machines of that class, the M1 Pro's performance looks fine: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-vs-apple-m1-pro#benchmarks https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-11900h-v... And it's important to note that Intel themselves were largely to blame for the fact that the larger MacBook Pro was still using a 2.5 year old CPU: Intel never shipped Ice Lake processors for desktop or high-power mobile, so the Coffee Lake Refresh processors didn't have a successor from Intel until five months before the M1 Pro and M1 Max launched.

GeekyBear 3y ago

It's worth remembering that Apple was testing ARM Macs a decade ago. They waited until they had CPU performance that was good enough to run emulated x86 software to pull the trigger. I'd add a point three to the above: Apple's own in-house software was ready to go when they launched the new chip.

dagaci 3y ago

As with Apple, Qualcomm claims so be faster than x86. This is true on the synthetic single core Geekbench benchmark compared to a 2019 Intel cpu. Today the Qualcomm beats the m3 in Geek-bench and the current amd 7940hs. But for real applications the 7940Hs, beats the Qualcomm even on Cinnebench Single core and multicore

lostmsu 3y ago
Which Qualcomm beats M3 in Geekbench?
fh9302 3y ago
Snapdragon X Elite does not beat the M3 in single-core. It does beat the M3 in multi-core because of the 12 high performance cores, compared to 4 in the M3. It's more of a M3 Pro competitor.
jeroenhd 3y ago
The problem you'll have with "real applications" is that they're written for amd64 or x86, and Qualcom's translator isn't exactly competitive. They're going to need Rosetta-like translation performance to beat Intel. Which also begs the question: do modern Qualcoms even come with native 32 bit support? Unlike amd64, aarch64 has no 32 bit compatibility guarantees. On Linux the situation will be very different. That's why I hope they release these devices for relatively cheap (because most applications and games will be quite slow) so Linux users can get good perf out of them for almost all native tools while Windows userspace catches up.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  They don't need native 32 bit ARM Windows support. That's essentially dead and never really took off to begin with, it's a handful of ancient apps in the Windows Store from the Surface RT days. Microsoft has already said they're removing it from the next version of Windows. x86 support will still be kicking around on Windows on ARM64 which is by far the bulk of 32 bit Windows programs. Microsoft's compatibility layers are pretty competitive. You get about 60% of the performance whereas Rosetta 2 is closer to 70%, which is impressive when you consider MS has no hardware bits to do that unlike Apple. What has been more of an issue is the slow CPUs themselves. The upcoming Orion chips should perform similarly to M1 on x86 programs.

hulitu 3y ago

> Apple has had success switching micro architectures twice now because 3. They also ported the only apps who ran on Macs. When Adobe, Autodesk, PTC, Cadence and so on, will have their programs ported to ARM, then yes, Windows will run on ARM.