I don't think they even used the term "ARM" at any point. They're calling it "Apple's silicon," and they acknowledged it's the same as what iPhone and iPad use. But I thought it was interesting how they seemed to avoid the term. It's probably just a matter of avoiding getting too "techy" and marketing.
The first guy in the "lab" scene (Johny maybe?) mentioned plenty of other "techy" terms. I think that they want to distance themselves from other ARM manufacturers and put the focus on Apple's advantages over Qualcomm and others.
ARM doesn't really matter very much to Apple - Apple designs the micro-architecture and many (most?) of the other SOC components themselves.
With the technology moves Apple has made, they could probably switch to RISC-V at this point, however being able to use ARM devtools probably adds more value to Apple than any cost savings moving Apple would gain from moving away from ARM
No, the custom silicon matters more. They've spent years building infrastructure to make it easy to change late stage code generation to multiple ISAs.
It doesn't. Ninety-nine point five nines of software is architecture-independent, and if you're an App Store sharecropper you'll never notice. It's the users with paid-for x86 binaries who will be screwed, like they were when Apple removed the ability to run PowerPC binaries in OS X 10.7.
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They mentioned running Linux in a VM at least twice in the keynote. I'm not sure why, unless it's an acknowledgement that OS X is no longer a usable development environment.
Linux, like any OS written in the past 30 years, is substantially architecture-independent. My day job involves coding for several devices with Linux kernels on ARM (32bit) and Aarch64 and I have no idea which is which, nor any need to.
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
(‘ARM’ has become meaningless marketing drivel; there are physically existing pairs of 32-bit ‘ARM’ processors that have exactly zero physically existing machine instructions in common.)
[Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose.
It's funny how that works. This story may be only tangentially related, but here goes: A few years back, I was visiting the local ARM offices in Trondheim, Norway. I happened to mention something about the iPhones using their processors, and my host immediately said, “I am not allowed to comment on that”. But everybody knows it, I said. In response, he said yes, but he still can't talk about it. Possibly, he broke the rule by admitting even that much.
I don't think it's strange at all. Consider for a moment, what competitive advantage does Apple have advertising that the iPhone uses an ARM CPU? The people who need to know the architecture can find out easily enough, the people who are just buying the latest iPhone know it has an Apple CPU.
Everyone and their dog has known that Apple uses Gorilla glass on their devices since the original iPhone. I believe it was only until recently (this year) that Apple executives acknowledged the relationship in any capacity (one of their SVP visited the Gorilla Glass factory with press)
FAANG NDAs can be crazy. I've been in a position where, yes, everyone knew something, and the other company openly talked about it, but because of the way the NDA was written there'd be heavy financial penalties for us to talk about what everyone seemed to know anyway.
I also thought this might be a 'dry run' for a risc-v strategy across their platforms, as risc-v was designed to be expanded for specific applications. Most of the IP is no doubt in the peripherals, which are largely CPU-instruction-set independent. We'll see. I say 5 years, tops, to first Apple risc-v device.
RISC-V doesn't really get Apple anything. They were a very very early investor in ARM back in the early 90s, and the rumor is that they have a pretty much "do whatever you want" licence to ARM technology.
Maybe people thought I was making some kind of value judgement about web developers not being "real developers" because they're not kernel hackers. That's just my guess though - I doubt any of the downvoters will see or reply to this.
