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Future of software in the era of Apple Silicon?
- Thread starter ozdy
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Security-enhanced pointers might need more than 64 bits. E.g. CHERI uses 128 bit pointers. But frankly, the CPU ”bits size” are about as useful of a concept nowadays as “RISC” or “CISC”. I mean, modern x86 CPUs have 512bit wide architectural registers. The data path is much longer than 64 bit as well. In the end the “bit size” is only the size of integer architectural registers, which is one aspect among many.
But what if my starship runs on anti-matter pellets that are the size of grains of rice, and fuel consumption is an integral part of the jump calculations...?
I wouldn't call it a one-time thing. Drivers and apps have to adhere to new APIs and stricter kernel rules with many of the yearly OS-releases. I know I haven't been able to run any beta during the last ten years not due to instabilities or the like, but because there's always a bunch of apps that need an update from their developer in order to work as intended. The Adobe suite and big complicated applications in particular are commonly broken.
Meanwhile there's still a decent chance that I can launch a piece of software designed for Win95 on my Win 11 PC. Of course that has the caveat of bloated code but there is a clear difference in priorities between MS and Apple and both have their pros and cons.
Absolutely. Apple software model relies on ongoing software maintenance efforts. It’s not friendly towards “fire and forget” products where software is released and forgotten. While Apple does invest substantial amount of effort into backwards compatibility (they even go as far as to emulate bugs in older OSes if the running software was built under that OS), their update and deprecation cycles are more aggressive than most other systems.
The background for this is that Apples OSes are essentially distributions that come with very rich and complex set of APIs while Windows has traditionally been bare-bones. The core Windows programming interface hasn’t changed much in very long time, with optional and separate frameworks being added on top. I mean, from what zu understand everything still runs on win32 API which was introduced in Windows 95! But macOS is a much more holistic product and software is being developed for a particular version of macOS. In retrospect, maybe switching to the yearly macOS releases was indeed a mistake…
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Microsoft has changed its driver APIs too. You can’t use 20 year old drivers on Windows either. Apple is still evolving the macOS kernel and I think that is a net positive. Especially for security. Most software works fine between versions.
The "bit-ness" of a CPU usually refers to the addressable memory range (i.e. address register) and/or the size of its data registers; 32-bits can address max 4GB of memory space, while 64-bits can 18 quintillion bytes of memory space. It'll definitely be a while before memory capacities reaches the limits of a 64-bits address CPU. I wouldn't say there's never a need for 128-bit CPU (the 640KB ought to be enough for everyone joke comes to mind), it's just that we probably will not hit it anytime soon.
The computation limits of a CPU (i.e. large numbers) does not (AFAIK) correlate to the "bit-ness" of a CPU. In fact, an 8-bit 6502 CPU can compute 80-bits floating point numbers. It just takes many CPU cycles with clever algorithms.
Handbrake has been Apple Silicon native for a while and supports the built in encoder hardware from what I understand.
This whole discussion reminds me of the fight between OS X users and Mac OS 9 users back in day! Not until OSX.2 did all the big software makers finally make OS X versions! The death of OS 9 classic software on stage by Steve was needed to flush all those stubborn Classic users and software makers!
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