Howdy Folks,
Interesting thread, particularly with the official announcement made on Monday. I didn't watch the whole keynote, but did watch the sections on macOS Big Sur and on the "Apple Silicon" transition. They mentioned three big things about the transition, Universal 2 (fat binaries are back LOL), Rosetta 2, and Virtualization support. The first two, were pretty much self explanatory during the keynote, but I feel the whole Virtualization topic was misleading, and potentially intentionally so. Virtualization is a technique where you basically partition off the host hardware (CPU, GPU, HDD, etc..) and run multiple OS's at the same time. This is done using Virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. This capability became possible when the Mac switched from PowerPC to Intel, and is very popular for developers and tech enthusiasts. Because the host hardware is partitioned off, performance is very good, as the virtualized OS (called guest OS) runs unmodified native code, at near parity without virtualization. Prior to the switch to Intel, there was a product (by Microsoft ironically) called Virtual PC, which was an Intel emulator (vices virtualization). Using that, you could run a VM (virtual machine) with Windows on your PowerPC based Mac. It worked, and performance was ok for light tasks, but this was not an option for games or heavy duty situations, as it was just too slow. The PowerPC had to build an Intel CPU (plus other components) in software, which was not even close to native speed.
In order for the new Macs to support virtualization, it would need to be able to partition the host hardware off, which is certainly a possibility, but that would mean it was running an ARM guest OS, not an Intel one. So the Linux distribution they showed, must have been an ARM version. This also means that when they were showing Docker, it must either be an ARM version of Docker, or running on Rosetta 2. IF the Linux or Docker they showcased was Intel based, that was NOT virtualization (which was the word they used), but emulation. However, if that were the case, you would think they would show Windows vices Linux. I mean a lot of what you can run in a Linux VM, you can run natively right on the Mac, without any application (like Parallels) needed. I strongly suspect, they were showing an ARM Linux VM, which really misses the point. Developers like to run x86 (or Intel if you will) VMs on their Macs to work seamlessly with their non-Mac customers or co-workers. This is just MHO, but what developers want/need is Intel compatibility, not virtualization. It just so-happens that they are both the same thing on current Macs.
One final thought on Rosetta 2. They made it sound like its was going to use binary translation (changing machine code form x86-64 to ARM) during install when possible, and then on-the-fly the rest of the time. This will be MUCH faster than emulation, and for most common office productivity type software, should be good-enough for most folks. They even demonstrated Tome Raider running under it, which impressed me. With games, if they have native Mac Metal port, and do not do anything too complex (like AVX instructions or something else), the pre-translation during install should work fairly well. If the ARM Mac could run a native version of said game at a good frame rate, the Rosetta 2 version should be 75 - 90% of the same performance. If the game requires a bunch of on-the-fly translation, it will not fare so well. Plus if the game doesn't use Metal.... all bets are off.
Personally, I am extremely interested in the raw performance of these new Mac systems, and can't wait till we get more info on them
Just my $0.02...
Thanks!
Rich S.
