Isn't 2020 the year apple supposed to release them ?
Only according to a sketchy hearsay rumour about something that "Intel expected" which could be:
(a) Complete hogwash
(b) A snippet from Intel's "due dilligence" worst-case scenario risk register.
(c) Arguably fulfilled if Apple updates the iMac with a T2 chip, in which case all Macs
will have an ARM chip - just not as the main CPU. OK, that's a bit of a stretch, although...**
Instead we are seeing rumors for update just for Intel last CPUs,
If an ARM transition did happen, it couldn't happen overnight, and they'd need to be selling
credible Intel Macs alongside ARM NewMacs for a few years. As I said below, I think some people are over-blowing the difficulties, but I think that's partly because they're imagining being forced to switch overnight. What they really stuffed up with the 2016 MBP, the 2018 Mac Mini and the 2019 Mac Pro was letting their predecessors get
so out of date that people were desperate to upgrade, then introduced drastic functionality and pricing changes - forcing people to re-think their workflow overnight (or stick with their old hardware).
I want Apple to move to ARM as soon as possible to make App Devolpers take their time and focus on ARM and utilize it's potential.
In 2020 the vast majority of developers
writing new code shouldn't need to know or care what CPU their code is running on and use hardware abstraction frameworks wherever possible (Metal, Accelerate, Core Audio etc.) even most hardware drivers can and should be written in compiled languages and work through OS calls. Including specific CPU code without very, very good reason (of course, there are always exceptions) - is just bad design, and might not take advantage of even future hardware in
Intel Macs (e.g. the Afterburner cards for the new Mac Pro).
...bear in mind that testing iOS apps in XCode already works by compiling the code for x86 and running it in an iOS-for-x86 sandbox.
In a way, Apple
have been preparing for ARM, in the sense that all of the App Store guidelines, dumping 32-bit, promoting Metal have been pushing people towards CPU-independent coding.
The big exception, of course, is established applications with legacy code dating back to Stonehenge (or, worse, 16-bit DOS/Windows). However, I have no idea how much of that has survived the transitions from PPC to x86-32 and x86-32 to x86-64 - and neither does anybody else unless they're actually working on such a codebase. The recent switch to 64-bit only will have culled a lot of ancient code and abandonware anyway.
Still, yes, "feasible" doesn't mean "trivial" and the first step would have to be a development system to allow applications to be re-compiled and tested. That's actually what happened with x86 - Apple produced what was basically a Hackintosh as a developers-only system about 6 months before launching the MacBook Pro (...and maybe key developers got it under NDA before that).
And hopefully make Apps that emulates old Intel based Apps.
...that could be the problem. Of course it is technically possible, but there might be some IP issues with emulating the x86-64 instruction set (I believe the emulator in ARM Windows is 32-bit only).
The
fundamental problem is that the raw processing speed of an ARM core is unlikely to be much faster than the Intel core it is replacing. Previous transitions (6502 to 68k, 68k to PPC, PPC to x86) have all come with a substantial boost in raw speed to offset the overhead of emulation.
The advantage of ARM is more about being able to cram on more cores and more on-chip accelerators and GPUs which will only be available to applications using standard MacOS frameworks (which will be strongly correlated to being relatively easy to port to ARM). So I'm not sure that emulation is going to be as key as it was in PPC-x86 or 68k to PPC.
Thinking about it, what if a new Mac couldn't run MS Word on day 1? In 2005, that would have been suicide. In 2020, with so many alternatives (like Pages, platform-independent web apps, or LibreOffice which already supports ARM Linux) it might be merely "courageous".
** Now, this is just speculation, but how far could Apple extend the T-series chips to include things like GPUs and USB4 (i.e. Thunderbolt in all but name) - effectively making them into A-series-like systems-on-a-chip, replacing a load of Intel motherboard & Thunderbolt chippery but keeping the Intel (or AMD) processor...?
