[wang_li]

This sounds weird. Are they going to have two versions of every executable? One arm and one intel? Or would this low power/power nap mode only support a tiny subset of functionality that apple chooses to include in their OS release?

[craigcabrey]

You make it sound like they've never done that before (Universal binaries).

[wang_li]

But those weren't both loaded into memory at the same time.

Thinking about this I've convinced myself that what will happen is the ARM core will periodically check for various statuses (i.e. connect to your imap/pop server and see if there is new mail) and turn on an indicator or perhaps wake the intel cores. Which is to say that the powernap/low power functionality will be restricted to either things apple delivers ootb or to a special API. Not as something that automatically migrates whatever workload is running on the powerful intel cores into a slow motion version of the same thing running on the ARM cores.

[an_account]

Yes, "power nap" is an existing feature that only does specific OS/apple specific operations (syncing, notifications, mail, calendar, indexing).

[ropiku]

They sort of do this already with iOS apps during development. iOS Simulator is a simulator, not an emulator so the developing app is compiled and run in native x86.

[H4CK3RM4N]

From the article it looks like the arm chip will have tasks offloaded onto is, like a GPU has graphics tasks offloaded onto it from the CPU.