Eventually. Not the first generation (replace dual core systems), not the second generation (replace 4 / 6 core systems, possibly released together with the first generation), but the third generation (replace 8 to 12 core systems).
All the low level stuff will remain unchanged. All the high level stuff is written in high level languages and work exactly the same on Intel and ARM chips. There is no technical reason not to release Intel MacOS versions for many years.
My green iMac was killed by lightning. Called my home insurance; they told me that they had lost a total of 200 computers in the area that night (that was back in the day when your phone line was practically directly connected to the modem in your computer, so a lightning could easily kill your computer. Today it would kill my broadband modem and possibly my router).
Please. Nobody optimises code for a particular processor. There will be a tiny bit of ARM specific code in multitasking, because the OS needs to take into consideration that 4+4 ARM cores are four fast and four slow cores, and pick the right ones for the job (like the OS needs to know that Intel 4 core + hyper threading means something quite similar, except single threads are always fast and have no power saving mode). There will be a bit of code that figures out processor cache sizes and what they mean. Apart from that, all is straightforward C / C++ / Objective-C or Swift code.
Is it just me, or is there a typo?
iMac Pro has Xeon CPUs.
The question is: How well-optimized is your self-compiled build of FFmpeg for these platforms?
...like HEVC encoding?
I'm waiting to see the same companies tell ARM Mac users "just run the iPhone application on the Mac"
1. There's a story going around that a year ago, someone submitted a benchmark for ARM on MacOS with some insane figures. That could obviously be a fake. Or Apple bought one of these 80 core ARM servers and made MacOS run on it, just to see that everything works fine with huge amounts of cores.
You can compile iPad apps for Intel processors (people do that all the time), so that should be no problem.
I have a Late 2012 mac mini, i7, 16 GB upgraded RAM and added an SSD for Fusion drive.
That's not a good comparison at all. Even if it had the exact same i7 processor, the iPad Pro would run a task like that at a fraction of the speed because it has no active cooling. If you're going to use words like "pure" and "raw" CPU power, you can't just ignore TDP and cooling system comparisons. Almost all the A12X benchmarks place it very competitively in range of recent intel i5 chips, painting a good picture of what that chip could likely do with good cooling... And that's just a phone chip with a couple extra cores. An 5nm Apple chip with 24W or higher TDP will likely knock the teeth out of intel's recent mobile offerings.
