Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak Discuss Apple Silicon Transition, Lack of Boot Camp Support, and More

[Alan Wynn]

Windows on arm is pointless

No. If Microsoft supports x86_64 trans-compiling/emulation and the Apple Silicon is reasonably fast, many applications will run just fine on it.

it’s not going to ruin existing third party windows apps. Which is the entire point of running Windows.

You are correct, it will not ruin existing third party Windows apps, but how well it runs them will be dependent on a few things like how graphics intensive they are, and what percentage of their code is Windows calls (that are native) vs. their own code that would have to be trans-compiled/emulated.

windows on arm will not see any adoption (beyond maybe 1% of Mac users) on the Mac, you can bet your house on that.

If it sees 1% of Mac users would have about the same adoption as Windows currently has on Macs. Given the number of Macs sold, that would likely increase the number of Windows Arm systems by an order of magnitude (or more). Given that many of these are higher end users, it might be worth it for companies to port to it at that point (given that could be over 100,000 systems).

 

[DeepIn2U]

Very late to this party here.

Apple's design has always been the shining star of the tech industry!
Apple's custom silicon work is beginning a new era and has been killing it for 10yrs!!

I just hope Siri FINALLY evolves and gets a huge boost in performance and features/capabilities beyond the competition, it's high time for this.

The Apple Navigator in all pretences is here in the iPad Pro 2018/2020 ... but it's AI assistant is dated back to 1985! She's great (default voice) and helps ... but so limited.

 

[Gerdi]

The main weakness of virtualization products like Parallels and VMware on the Mac has always been GPU performance. While CPU applications run at near native speeds under virtualization, the same can't be said about GPU performance. Despite all the marketing from Parallels and VMware about improved graphics performance with their products, it still does not come close to native. This is why gamers use Boot Camp. Even if Windows for ARM becomes popular and lots of Windows developers start making applications and games for ARM, virtualization on ARM Macs would still have the issue of GPU performance. Supposedly, this has been addressed on the PC side so VMs running in VMware for PC can access the full power of the GPU. VMware previously said they were unable to do the same thing on the Mac due to lack of support in MacOS. Which is also why there is no graphics acceleration for MacOS VMs in VMware Fusion. Will the updated virtualization support in Big Sur address GPU access?

Thing is, virtualization solutions do virtualize the CPU but not devices like a GPU. The GPU is owned by the host driver and not by the guest driver.
What you can do is providing a guest driver, which forwards commands to the host driver. For the case at hand Apple would need to provide a Windows Direct3d driver, which translates Direct3d into Metal, which then communicates to the Metal driver on the host.
Microsoft is working on something very similar for WSL2. Namely a Linux MESA OpenGL driver with a Direct3d backend -> Linux side Direct3d driver -> Windows side Direct3d driver.

 

[etaipale]

What do these guys use for hardware for this call? It's like Gruber has an AMAZING webcam. And I figured he's using the Earpods for the Microphone. But then the other guys seem to have a massive external mic. ? Still trying to figure out what the best gear to get to do this well since we all live on teleconf these days...

I think the microphone used by both Apple guys is a Shure SM7B

 

[throAU]

No. If Microsoft supports x86_64 trans-compiling/emulation and the Apple Silicon is reasonably fast, many applications will run just fine on it.

To be clear, with that "windows on arm" statement I made, I was referring to native ARM windows. Not x86/x64 windows running on ARM via emulation.

Emulating x86 to the degree that you can run another operating system is not something I believe Rosetta 2 will be capable of, so I did not consider that in the above statement. I really suspect that Rosetta2 will be for non-ARM Mac applications only. Doing full emulation to enable virtual machines is not something I believe Apple will bother with due to the technical difficulty/expense vs. net benefit to the platform.

Sure some users would want it but if it is even possible I don't think it will be performant and not enough users will care enough if it isn't there to justify trying that.



edit:

ahh. mis-read. you're talking about MICROSOFT enabling cross-compatibility within ARM windows to run x64 Windows apps inside it.

My confidence with Microsoft doing a good job of that are even less than the above

Far easier to encourage people to buy new cloud based/cross platform software. Microsoft will just do what they always do, users will be force upgraded to maintain compatibility with the new version of office.

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

To be clear, with that "windows on arm" statement I made, I was referring to native ARM windows. Not x86/x64 windows running on ARM via emulation.

Emulating x86 to the degree that you can run another operating system is not something I believe Rosetta 2 will be capable of, so I did not consider that in the above statement. I really suspect that Rosetta2 will be for non-ARM Mac applications only. Doing full emulation to enable virtual machines is not something I believe Apple will bother with due to the technical difficulty/expense vs. net benefit to the platform.

Sure some users would want it but if it is even possible I don't think it will be performant and not enough users will care enough if it isn't there to justify trying that.



edit:

ahh. mis-read. you're talking about MICROSOFT enabling cross-compatibility within ARM windows to run x64 Windows apps inside it.

My confidence with Microsoft doing a good job of that are even less than the above

Far easier to encourage people to buy new cloud based/cross platform software. Microsoft will just do what they always do, users will be force upgraded to maintain compatibility with the new version of office.

This is a moot point as Windows on ARM still means none of your existing x86 apps will work and you'd have to buy all new all over again. So what's the point? Well, maybe if Microsoft said, "Hey, we''ll give you the ARM version of Office cheap without buying it from scratch", that might be something. But without that, this is a serious problem for many businesses with Macs.

 

[cmaier]

This is a moot point as Windows on ARM still means none of your existing x86 apps will work and you'd have to buy all new all over again. So what's the point? Well, maybe if Microsoft said, "Hey, we''ll give you the ARM version of Office cheap without buying it from scratch", that might be something. But without that, this is a serious problem for many businesses with Macs.

Office 365 subscriptions would presumably give your the arm version of office for “free” as part of your subscription. Don;t know if it would be any good.

 

[throAU]

Office 365 subscriptions would presumably give your the arm version of office for “free” as part of your subscription. Don;t know if it would be any good.

Office 365 apps run in a browser fairly well, run on an iPad/iPhone just fine, are mostly available for Mac, etc.

Legacy x64 windows stuff is mostly going to be non-microsoft software, because Microsoft have mostly ported their currently supported stuff to other platforms, an exception being MS access, and GUI tools for Windows administration. but for CLI windows admin stuff there's powershell which is cross platform now.

 

[Gerdi]

This is a moot point as Windows on ARM still means none of your existing x86 apps will work and you'd have to buy all new all over again. So what's the point? Well, maybe if Microsoft said, "Hey, we''ll give you the ARM version of Office cheap without buying it from scratch", that might be something. But without that, this is a serious problem for many businesses with Macs.

What are you talking about? Most x86 apps do indeed run under Windows ARM via emulation. And when an ARM version is available, you do not need a new license - assuming you already have licensed the latest version of the software.
Point in case, with Office 365 you get the right version for your machine.
Or if we are talking about a Windows Store app, the store will chose the best version for your machine. If only the x86 version is available it will install this - otherwise the ARM version is installed.
In other cases you need to chose the right version yourself, when downloading the application, like it is the case for Firefox browser, VLC player, Visual Studio Code etc. - you would chose the ARM version despite the fact that the x86 version would run as well on your Windows ARM machine.

 

[TrevorR90]

So no boot camp support is in the works.... is it related to demand? Or just Microsoft being Microsoft?

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I think it’s more related to the fact that BootCamp was made possible because, whether Mac or Windows, all of the underlying hardware worked in expected ways because they were based on a common Intel design. ARM is just a processor, not an entire motherboard infrastructure. That’s great in that a company is free to design a motherboard that fits their specific needs. BUT, it also means that, without a common underlying architecture, there should be little expectation that an OS running on one ARM designed system will run on another as seamlessly as BootCamp provided.

 

[Gerdi]

I think it’s more related to the fact that BootCamp was made possible because, whether Mac or Windows, all of the underlying hardware worked in expected ways because they were based on a common Intel design. ARM is just a processor, not an entire motherboard infrastructure. That’s great in that a company is free to design a motherboard that fits their specific needs. BUT, it also means that, without a common underlying architecture, there should be little expectation that an OS running on one ARM designed system will run on another as seamlessly as BootCamp provided.

It is pretty much standardized for ARM systems as well nowadays. If you implement proper UEFI/ACPI interfaces along with standardized system HW like GIC - a 3rd party OS can and will boot. Thats how you boot and run Windows ARM on a Raspberry PI - without any Raspberry specific changes to Windows.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Thats how you boot and run Windows ARM on a Raspberry PI - without any Raspberry specific changes to Windows.

That was some interesting Googling. One thing I found was the effort to install Android and Windows 10 ARM on iPhone. Technically possible, but requires jailbreaking. It remains to be seen if Apple’s Silicon system is as different from Windows ARM requirements as the iPhone is. I tend to think that Apple will design something just different enough that running Windows 10 will not be as easy as buying Windows 10 ARM and installing it (unlike the current BootCamp).