WWDC
Interesting.. Rosetta redux. Performance will be interesting, given what a nightmare of an ISA x64 is - but custom silicon may help.
re: WWDC
@porsupah Was not expecting them to be able to bring this to market till the AMD64 ISA patent expires next April, but I guess AMD have given them a grace period on it. (Intel's prior 64 patents have all expired.)
re: WWDC
@porsupah Desktop/Notebook performance scale has been there for a while. (It's already at Server Rack scale.) The blocker really has just been the problem of transitioning software. Intel were strongly enforcing their patents on anyone who tried to ship bytecode translation from x64 to Arm64. Intel's basic patents on x64 have all expired now, and AMD's expire next April. Only patents left cover extensions such as AES acceleration that are mainly used in libraries, so can be intercepted at that level instead.
re: WWDC
@jayblanc I suspect they've seen how well the A-series has turned out in performance, whilst remaining thrifty on consumption. The iPad Pro's now keeping pace with low/mid-end Intel - give it perhaps active cooling (or not! Would be great to see laptops /without/ the need for active cooling again), and much greater power consumption peak usage - they've got quite a lot of latitude to work with, not to mention being able to toss in their own additions like the neural engine on the SoC - it's likely to be a cheap family of chips, with at least comparable performance on the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac lines. The Mac Pro's likely to be the last to shift, but even there, I doubt even Xeon will be able to prevail.
Exciting times ahoy! ^_^