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by rob74 1551 days ago
Beside "being able to switch from x86", there are some other factors that make this feat look easier than it actually is:

- building on the ARM architecture, which (1) saved them a lot of design costs and (2) being a simpler architecture already has a "built-in" performance advantage over x86.

- having years of experience already with the "A-series" of chips used in iPhones and iPads since 2010. Everyone is talking about "Apple silicon" now, but these predecessors are often forgotten.

- having a privileged partnership with TSMC, where they have access to the latest and best processes and priority over all other TSMC customers.
1 comments
bayindirh 1551 days ago
You're forgetting the most important one:

- This is not heir first rodeo. They've migrated from PowerPC to x86 and developed first Rosetta, UniversalBinary format and related machinery.

They've tapped into that experience, and it went way way smoother.

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cestith 1551 days ago
Just within Mac they've gone from 680x0 to PowerPC (related to POWER but separate), to AMD64, to Apple Silicon. Before the Mac, they also had the 6502 and 6800 platforms.
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dwaite 1551 days ago
They went 32 bit x86 before adding support for amd64 bit and then eliminating 32 bit right before going to apple silicon (presumably in part motivated by rosetta 2 being optimized for translating amd64 software)
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cestith 1551 days ago
You're right. I'd forgotten about that. I haven't forgotten about the weird 64-bit-CPU-with-32-bit-EFI snafu, though. That was a pain.
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bayindirh 1551 days ago
However, as far as I can remember, they didn’t had to make a transition plan like they did in Intel transition.

They had to research how to make it completely seamless that time, for the first time.

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zactato 1551 days ago
That was like 20 years ago. I wonder how many of those folks are still around. It would be interesting to understand how they ran this project internally. Did it build off of that previous work or did they approach it from the ground up.
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tines 1551 days ago
It's a small nitpick but I think technically they moved from PowerPC, not POWER.
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bayindirh 1551 days ago
Yeah, you’re right, sorry. Fixed it. :)
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