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by eliasmacpherson 962 days ago
On Rosetta 2, from the horses mouth:

Rosetta translates all x86_64 instructions, but it doesn't support the execution of some newer instruction sets and processor features, such as AVX, AVX2, and AVX512 vector instructions.

I can imagine quite a number of users running into the above situation in multimedia related code.
1 comments
afavour 962 days ago
That’s still a small minority of all the apps out there, though.
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thereddaikon 962 days ago
But we're talking about Macs. That's a huge chunk of their userbase. For the people who use Macs for actual work you can broadly classify them in two groups, Devs who need Xcode and media. Yes there are exceptions but that's the majority. For one of those groups AVX is pretty important.
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izacus 962 days ago
And those apps had to be ready too. You don't build a reliable platform by randomly breaking "a small minority of apps". You yourself are certanly in "small minority" of at least a few features you rely on.
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afavour 962 days ago
This is just an endless logic circle.

“Not all apps needed to worry about the CPU change”

“But some did!”

“And Apple made test hardware available for those people”

“But not enough for all apps to be tested”

“Not all apps needed to worry about the CPU change”

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eliasmacpherson 962 days ago
To clarify:

The initial claim was, lxgr: "If you were initially fine with software emulation (i.e. Rosetta 2), as were many small and large software projects for macOS or Unix, you had no need whatsoever to get a DTK."

The subsequent claim was, xvector: "Rosetta 2 was straightforward and surprisingly fast, requiring zero tweaking or user interaction. Most people never even noticed."

Posters, myself included, are reacting against these claims, as they both put the cart before the horse, and the second gives only an end user perspective.

Devs had verified with a DTK that Rosetta2 ran their programs acceptably. Keep in mind patches had to be issued for programs which did not check for the presence of AVX, AVX2 or AVX512, else they would crash. This invalidates the first claim. It shows why the second claim is only the second half of the story.

So the logic follows a line rather than a circle.

Also nobody made the claim that: “And Apple made test hardware available for those people, But not enough for all apps to be tested”

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