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Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

(www.macrumors.com)
1080 points antipaul | 10 comments | 12 Nov 20 00:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.732s | source | bottom
1. Aperocky ◴[12 Nov 20 02:22 UTC] No.25065701[source]▶
ARM is the future, at least in laptops.

Apple lead the fray again, it's incredible.

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2. systemvoltage ◴[12 Nov 20 02:51 UTC] No.25065872[source]▶
I have a burning question: Can I use gcc, python, etc. on the new M1-based Macbooks? I am thinking about getting one but not sure if I can use it as a development machine. How does rosetta translation layer work with brew apps and other binaries?
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3. knolan ◴[12 Nov 20 02:57 UTC] No.25065910[source]▶
They showed this during the previous transition announcement. They flashed up a screen of various open source tools that they’ve tested. It even included Blender.

Here is the image: http://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/200623_A...

4. lawnchair_larry ◴[12 Nov 20 03:37 UTC] No.25066139[source]▶
Brew would just compile the ARM version and it should work the same for the most part. Same as running Linux on ARM (like raspberry pi).

I’m not sure if it supports it immediately, but this isn’t a difficult change, so it will certainly come soon.

5. jsjohnst ◴[12 Nov 20 03:48 UTC] No.25066206[source]▶
I don’t have an M1 yet, but the things you mentioned work perfectly fine on my Developer Preview hardware, so I don’t see any reason they wouldn’t on the production hardware.
6. my123 ◴[12 Nov 20 03:49 UTC] No.25066218[source]▶
Yes you can.

For GCC targeting arm64 macOS, the dev branch is at https://github.com/iains/gcc-darwin-arm64/ currently.

For Rosetta, everything runs except virtualisation apps.

7. onedr0p ◴[12 Nov 20 05:05 UTC] No.25066646[source]▶
Apple is hardly the first laptop manufacturer that built a arm based laptop. Microsoft did it before them with the Surface back in 2012. However it's not going to be as popular as Apple's laptop.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT

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8. jb1991 ◴[12 Nov 20 08:03 UTC] No.25067580[source]▶
Apple is rarely "first" with anything (they were nowhere near the first with mp3 players, for example). But they are often first-in-class once they commit to an idea. And then we got the iPod after many other companies tried to also do that in the preceding years. ARM is not new, but Apple committing to this is going to be very disruptive, and ultimately a more impressive implementation, in ways the Surface never was.
9. Aperocky ◴[12 Nov 20 17:06 UTC] No.25071882[source]▶
But it seems that everyone else had the idea that ARM is cheap material and only Apple put in enough effort to make the full potential of both the instruction set and the chip design.
10. Beached ◴[14 Nov 20 05:13 UTC] No.25090458[source]▶
people have been saying that for over a decade.