[olliej]

Those versions literally mean that they're part of the spec. That other companies are shipping out of date ARM specs doesn't mean apple has magic proprietary instructions. Hell, IIRC the first we heard about the new ARM8.3 instructions was a Qualcomm white paper.

Anyway, this is no different from targeting x86_64 - you can compile targeting the most recent ISA, or you can run on more hardware. No one says AVX2 is a proprietary extension, but it sure as heck won't work on an older x86_64 cpu.

[Kirby64]

Alright, you're right - it is part of the spec. Non-standard is the wrong terminology. My point being though, Apple tends to be ahead of others in terms of adopting (for better or for worse) new standards, and their influence in the market can sometimes make those changes happen at a spec level (i.e. tell ARM they want a new instruction, and magically it'll be in the spec).

The original comment's point is this would be good for the RPi org... which use comparatively ancient ARM processors (even the brand new RPi4). I don't see how Apple entering the ARM space on desktop is relevant at all.

[olliej]

oh yeah, i don't see how it impacts RPi at all.

RPi benefits from general adoption of ARM in performance markets, as low performance ARMs benefit from general improvements in compiler ARM backends.