Apple Executives Discuss the New A14 Chip and Apple's Approach to Chip Design

[Alan Wynn]

An interesting counterpart to that is, presumably Apple could add Apple-specific instructions to the instruction set, to the benefit of macOS (and iOS), which would, as a side effect, make ARM Hackintoshes much more tricky to implement.

ARM Hackintoshes are likely to be very difficult, or very limited in functionality. They will not have Apple’s Neural Engine, performance controller (for assigning tasks to specific processors) nor will they have Apple’s GPU’s (which would mean that someone would have to figure out how to write a driver for something else. Given that people have not really done that for the current macOS that is less locked down from a security perspective, I am not sure how possible that will be.

 

[chucker23n1]

ARM Hackintoshes are likely to be very difficult, or very limited in functionality. They will not have Apple’s Neural Engine, performance controller (for assigning tasks to specific processors) nor will they have Apple’s GPU’s (which would mean that someone would have to figure out how to write a driver for something else. Given that people have not really done that for the current macOS that is less locked down from a security perspective, I am not sure how possible that will be.

They would also need to emulate iBoot or find a way to boot macOS from a different firmware.

I don't think the performance controller matters that much, though; many ARM CPUs have similar mechanisms like big.LITTLE. As for GPUs, yeah, someone would probably have to disable the digital signature check and then write a driver. Definitely more effort than Intel, but not necessarily impossible.