Apple is officially moving away from Intel to a custom Arm chip

norm norm.rowtree at gmail.com
Wed Jul 1 08:12:37 UTC 2020


On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 22:46:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 20:58:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Search on "desktop computer". On the left, you'll find a CPU 
>> menu. No ARM processors in it. Neither for Amazon.
>
> Yeah, ARM's primary competitive advantage over x86 is lower 
> power consumption, which means they are biased toward the 
> portable market. There are still various wall-outlet arm 
> devices, especially single-board computers (SBC for short) like 
> the raspberry pi and pine64, but they are still a different 
> form-factor than the traditional desktop... probably just 
> because there's no actual need for them to be larger, and while 
> many new x86 devices don't need much space either, arm devices 
> don't have the same traditional history to push it out of habit 
> either.
>
> They also tend to be sold in those single board forms rather 
> than individual components for DIYers who don't like the big 
> brands, so instead of getting a CPU on newegg, you'd just order 
> an all-in-one board and a case for it.
>
> Anyway, whether wall-power SBC, or one of the portable options 
> like a laptop or phone, you can connect them to all the same 
> accessories to give a desktop experience: keyboard, mouse, 
> speakers, monitor, and not know the difference unless you look 
> under the cover for a great many tasks.

ARM is everywhere, the entire computer industry and internet 
hangs off devices with ARM cores. This is not true for Intel. For 
the last 5 yrs the entire embedded industry has moved towards 
ARM. Apple are just jumping on the bandwagon :-)

Any device running software that was manufactured in the last 5 
yrs will likely have an ARM core in there somewhere. Even in a 
desktop in the PSU or motherboard. More recent AMD x86 CPUs have 
an ARM core in the silicon. All those ARM cores are running 
software and that production software is currently C or C++11 (or 
higher).

The current trend for embedded is C++14 with GCC or IAR 
compilers. Prior to C++11 the industry was stuck in its ways with 
C, but C++11 and the committee direction has really changed all 
that. There are teams that still insist on C only but they are 
becoming less and less.

Rust is starting to gain a lot of traction in embedded as the 
alternative language for production code. Most people I talk with 
at trade shows and conferences like that the compiler shouts 
loudly a them if they do something considered unsafe by the 
language. When I ask about the friction Rust introduces most say 
they get used to it and then begin to like it because they see 
all the noise is actually for good reasons. Frequent I hear 
comments like "once the code compiles I have a lot more 
confidence my program is memory safe and correct". This is not 
true for C++, even C++20 because there are so many corners in the 
language rules.

Sadly D isn't even on the radar, mostly because Rust marketing is 
so strong but also for those that do look at it there is no 
official ARM support. D could compete and do well in the embedded 
space with its feature set, low-friction like Python yet familiar 
C-like syntax.

Norm


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