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

[kinke]

On Wednesday, 24 June 2020 at 11:21:51 UTC, aberba wrote:
> Note there's similar move by Microsoft to get their system to
> work on Arm chips.

Windows ARM laptops have been around for some time, with such 
enormous success that many people haven't even heard or already 
forgotten about it. E.g., 
https://www.techspot.com/review/1599-windows-on-arm-performance/.

Providing (software) x86 emulation (32-bit only IIRC) on an 
already slow CPU wasn't a great idea. Apple will probably just 
hope/try to enforce that the publishers port and recompile all 
their packages (incl. any x86-specific optimizations), so that 
the code is at least native.

They'll probably have to put a lot of work into single-thread 
performance though if they want to seriously compete with x86 in 
the laptop/desktop segment and according TDP budget + use cases. 
I'm pretty sure a high number of relatively slow cores won't cut 
it against the likes of Zen 2 and its successors.