Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on June 23, 2020 2:20 am wrote:
> Anne O. Nymous (not.delete@this.real.address) on June 23, 2020 1:58 am wrote:
> > hobold (hobold.delete@this.vectorizer.org) on June 23, 2020 1:07 am wrote:
> > > Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on June 22, 2020 11:57 pm wrote:
> > >
> > > > I've posted the wikipedia PPC->Intel transition page here like 10 times. I've explained
> > > > many more times than that how this transition will follow that exact same script. And
> > > > yet people refuse to listen up till the minute that the announcements occur.
> > > >
> > > Apple's history of transitions, both m68k -> PowerPC, and PowerPC -> x86, did follow the script
> > >
> > > 1. have a complicated and unreliable translator that works good
> > > enough for stage presentations and very simple programs
> > >
> > > 2. quickly abandon the translation layer before it ever learns to deal with the hard cases
> > >
> > > Been there, observed that. Twice.
> > >
> > > You know how the saying goes: "Any sufficiently advanced
> > > technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
> >
> > Yes, but with MS and Adobe on board (in addition to Apple's own software) to go ARM-native
> > soon, quite a number of users will never ever have to actually use the translation
> > layer, so that is great customer handling and management of expectations.
> > I believe Maynards assessment of this is spot on. This is there to ease customer concerns pro-actively,
> > just as the intel-for-several more years and universal2 announcement served to convince customers
> > that apple's current x86 offerings are still worth buying today and tomorrow.
>
>
> Already having some critical apps ported to ARM was what I felt was the biggest surprise. Not because it is
> surprising that they worked with them, but they apparently were able to keep it a secret - no leaked benchmarks
> of a macOS machine running ARM, no random Twitter accounts with a photo of "uname -a" output on it, etc. Considering
> how everyone always knows the full details of the new iPhone months before release it is somewhat surprising
> to me they managed to keep this under wraps while working with multiple outside companies.
>
> Which is why I'm not surprised we are seeing these Macs this year instead of 2021 like
> I had predicted. I was assuming the third party porting work and testing would begin
> in July, but apparently it has already been going on for months now. I wonder how long
> the first ARM Macs have already been in the hands of third party developers?
>
> I'm particularly curious what they may have been working on with Microsoft as
> far as helping out the Mac users who rely on Windows beyond simply porting.

I must admit I was rather surprised at them starting to ship systems by the end of the year. The only area I can see problems with translation though are with games, and mainly those running under Windows. Any other useful stuff will get converted soon enough. I see no good solution for that but it certainly isn't a killer in the Mac market.

It does lead to the queston though of what Microsoft can get out of it. Could they run their ARM verison of Windows 10 on a decent machine? Some games could then be run under Windows 10 which also can run old x86 programs.Five year old games might run at a reasonable speed under that, and that could well be good enough. It doesn't do x64 though.

And that lads to another quetion, the Macs almost certinly would be doing x64 binary translation, was Microsoft only doing x86 translation because it was easier, or to encourage more recent programs to convert, or because Intel talked about patents?