Apple Silicon Only apps? (Not universal)

[Fraserh02]

I am aware that universal apps are the way forward so that apps work on both intel and arm, and any applications not updated will be run through the new Rosetta 2.

My question however is have apple announced a way for developers to release apps in future future that are exclusive to only work on Apple Silicon? I'm sure this will happen at some point, but am I right in thinking they haven't?

The reason I'm asking is I remember back with the PowerPC to intel transition, there were cases where some applications would only work on the new intel Mac's, and I am just wondering if during this transition if there will be any applications which will only work on the new Apple Silicon Macs (excluding iOS apps).

Thanks

 

[chabig]

My question however is have apple announced a way for developers to release apps in future future that are exclusive to only work on Apple Silicon?

Developers are free to choose which platform(s) to target.

 

[casperes1996]

Technically even a year ago I could've made a program that would run on an Apple Silicon Mac, but not an Intel one. It wouldn't be a GUI app since AppKit of course wasn't available for ARM at that point, but could easily enough do a command line program with ARM instructions

 

[ruslan120]

Free idea: ”i am rich” for ARM Macs.
Let people know you have an ARM.
[automerge]1593340866[/automerge]
On a serious note can we* write a benchmarking tool that tests ISA extensions already available on x86 on ARM to see how apple’s chips perform relative to x86? Do they exist already?

Do I understand correctly that the ISA + extensions isn’t exposed but the assembly can be viewed?

* we the users once these chips are out

 

[leman]

On a serious note can we* write a benchmarking tool that tests ISA extensions already available on x86 on ARM to see how apple’s chips perform relative to x86? Do they exist already?

Why not use existing benchmarks? SPEC CPU2017 does a good job estimating various aspects of CPU performance and scores for both Intel and Apple ARM chips are publicly available.

 

[ruslan120]

Why not use existing benchmarks? SPEC CPU2017 does a good job estimating various aspects of CPU performance and scores for both Intel and Apple ARM chips are publicly available.

My thoughts - to get a better understanding of what the CPU optimizes for, or what width of vector operations, branching, memory performance etc. But that answers the question, thank you

 

[casperes1996]

My thoughts - to get a better understanding of what the CPU optimizes for, or what width of vector operations, branching, memory performance etc. But that answers the question, thank you

If you're interested in vectorised code on A chips you may want to look at this

Parsing JSON using SIMD instructions on the Apple A12 processor – Daniel Lemire's blog

lemire.me

At least the A12 "only" has 128-bit wide vector registers. Now the result table you first see in that link is not clock speed normalised, so while it shows the ARM vectors running slower than even SSE, with higher clocked Mac versions it'd likely be a bit faster, but not at the level of AVX. - It should also be noted that Rosetta 2 cannot translate AVX instructions, only regular instructions. SIMD code written with higher level languages and frameworks such as accelerate will not require any tweaking to optimise for A series chips though, it's only if you've done it by hand you'll need to work on it.

But this is just the current A chips. We don't know what the chips that will be put in Macs will really be like and Apple could for all we know have 256 or even 512-bit wide vector registers in those

 

[ruslan120]

You are a gentleman and a scholar. Reading now!