Apple leaving Intel for ARM - how will it affect Lazarus/FPC/Cocoa?

[AlanTheBeast]

Yep, transitioning to all Apple Silicon for Mac computers within two years. Rosetta 2 to run Intel binaries on Apple Silicon.

Developers can apply to be selected to pay $US 500 to obtain an Apple Silicon-based (A12Z processor + 16G + 512G SSD) Mac mini for development.

Some random thoughts.  (W/o much thinking behind them...):

The mysterious thing in the presentation was the "Virtualization" part to run OS' "like Linux" but Windows was not even hinted at ... Bootcamp least of all.

Recall that Rosetta 1 was abandoned at some point ... not sure how well Rosetta 2 will handle VMWare Fusion and Win 10 or another OS.... or perhaps VMWare will make a onetime pass translator... (as Rosetta does...).

Could it be that MS will release a general ARM v. of Windows?  (They have this for the Surface whatever laptop - not sure what state it's in).

When you return the AppleSi Mac Mini, you'll probably get a production version back (they did something like this for the PPC->intel transition).

I have a lot of FPC code to support (for my personal and business needs) so look forward to it working on AppleSi.

[skalogryz]

Could it be that MS will release a general ARM v. of Windows?  (They have this for the Surface whatever laptop - not sure what state it's in).

I think they've already done it.
and IIRC there's already a work underway for FPC ARM for winAPI

the only question to have it bootstrapped is availability of mac hardware ARM drivers.
I'm pretty sure MS and Apple worked on that already.

[AlanTheBeast]

I just watched the WWDC section on the new AppleSi Macs.
https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE?t=6115

So, within the virtualization environment supported by Rosetta, he has Parallels running Linux.

So was that an intel Linux or an ARM Linux?

Parallels was x86 (right?) and it does x86 virtualization (right?) - so it would appear that they've gone all out to support any x86 app at any level as long as there's a host OS ... stunning!

(I reserve the right to babble more...)

[AlanTheBeast]

Could it be that MS will release a general ARM v. of Windows?  (They have this for the Surface whatever laptop - not sure what state it's in).

I think they've already done it.
and IIRC there's already a work underway for FPC ARM for winAPI

the only question to have it bootstrapped is availability of mac hardware ARM drivers.
I'm pretty sure MS and Apple worked on that already.

Ah!  I thought that was a deadend product.  Things are getting interesting.   Could the merger from hell be in the works too?  (kidding).

[ChrisR]

As Jean-Louis Gassée notes (https://mondaynote.com/arm-mac-impact-on-intel-9641a8e73dca), laptops and desktops provide proportionally very little of the profits for Intel (which makes most money from servers) and Apple (that makes most money from iOS). One view is that this is Apple's attempt to reduce investment by unifying their platforms. Another option is that Apple wants to grow into servers and the cloud. People seem to be focused on the ARM CPU, but the big story may be the GPUs (and dedicate machine learning logic) with Metal. Most people think of Metal for graphics, but it is a great compute language. Apple has deprecated selling Nvidia (with its competing CUDA) and deprecated OpenCL. Apple may be going for Intel's piece of the cloud (similar to AWS Graviton) and Nvidia's piece of the cloud (CUDA). For the iPhone, the GPUs use more die space than the CPU (https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/2) and they are terrific for embarrassingly parallel problems.

[AlanTheBeast]

Apple surely have great prices from intel ... still 20,000,000 processors/year is something until it's nothing.

[PascalDragon]

Could it be that MS will release a general ARM v. of Windows?  (They have this for the Surface whatever laptop - not sure what state it's in).

We have a Windows on ARM64 laptop at work and I also have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4 at home inside a KVM (the "hardware" support for KVM is better than on native Pi 4 though in theory that works as well). And yes, FPC has initial support for aarch64-win64 as well.

[dbannon]

So, we end up with a Raspberry Mac.

If at some stage FPC/Lazarus do support it (and that is not a little 'if'),  do we then have a situation were FPC/Lazarus could produce code for all the Mac products  ?  iPad and iPhone ? That would be pretty cool, and must be the way Apple is thinking, trying to reduce the diversity of Operating Systems ?

But we all saw how wildly successful Microsoft was with its Windows powered phone and Canonical spent so much on Unity, only really because it wanted to take Ubuntu onto mobile ....

Davo

[marcov]

As Jean-Louis Gassée notes (https://mondaynote.com/arm-mac-impact-on-intel-9641a8e73dca), laptops and desktops provide proportionally very little of the profits for Intel (which makes most money from servers)

I don't read that. Higher margins, sure, but that is barely a surprise with server processors going up to $4000, but for the absolute case I only see the unsourced "Intel’s real money is in high-end CPUs sold to prosperous Cloud operators"  remark.

So, we end up with a Raspberry Mac.

Considering that one of the defining aspects of RPI is its price, I doubt it :-)

[PascalDragon]

If at some stage FPC/Lazarus do support it (and that is not a little 'if'),  do we then have a situation were FPC/Lazarus could produce code for all the Mac products  ?  iPad and iPhone ? That would be pretty cool, and must be the way Apple is thinking, trying to reduce the diversity of Operating Systems ?

You are aware that FPC already supports iPad and iPhone? And as Jonas said adding support for ARM macOS shouldn't be that difficult. Main point is a development machine to test the port on.

So, we end up with a Raspberry Mac.

Considering that one of the defining aspects of RPI is its price, I doubt it :-)

Considering that people started to run macOS on non-Apple hardware with the advent of the x86 version I'm rather sure that we'll see people trying to get it running on the Pi as well (after all people did the same with the Windows on ARM64 which does not officially support the Pi or the various phones out there )

[AlanTheBeast]

Main point is a development machine to test the port on.

If "we" qualify for a dev machine I'll happily contribute to the $500 for the machine Dev Kit.

[Handoko]

You can consider to sponsor the development:
https://foundation.freepascal.org/

Or post a bounty/job:
https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/board,41.0.html

[PascalDragon]

You can consider to sponsor the development:
https://foundation.freepascal.org/

Or post a bounty/job:
https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Bounties
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/board,41.0.html

We're already discussing this on the core mailing list.

If we intend to fund this through the Foundation and require more money I'm sure that we'll post a notice.

[Handoko]

That is good news.
It is good too see the Foundation is active.

Don't be shy to ask money.
Although 'money is evil', but money really can make the development faster.
Blender 3D, GIMP, Inkscape even Wikipedia are 'shamelessly' having a donation box on their front page.

[skalogryz]

Don't be shy to ask money.

Please support me on Patreon!