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

All those thinking of buying the new MBA, are you not concerned about availability of applications? Not all x86 applications will have an ARM alternative, yet.

There are a few exceptions but...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

Had access to a DTK, and know even more devs who have one. Even that machine could run essentially all x86 software just fine with Rosetta (including things like dynamically loaded plugins). Only thing missing is virtualization, but that's coming soon (Docker & Parallels are working with Apple).

Nope. This transition will be fast. Not like PPC -> Intel at all.

Everyone is on Xcode these days and using much higher level frameworks. Adobe and Microsoft already announced early 2021 availability of native binaries.

Besides, Rosetta 2 is even more impressive than the original was. I’m betting it will be a breeze. 6 months in and almost everything will be native.

Rosetta 2 sounds pretty good

> fun fact: retaining and releasing an NSObject takes ~30 nanoseconds on current gen Intel, and ~6.5 nanoseconds on an M1

> …and ~14 nanoseconds on an M1 emulating an Intel

https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262384342355...

I won't be replacing my workstation this weekend but then, I won't be updating it to Big Sur just yet either. I am getting a new personal machine sometime in the next year though I don't imagine I'll be buying an Intel Mac.

I haven't encountered any problems running x86 programs on the DTK. Performance is fine (with a slower CPU than the MBA) and everything I tried running worked. I'm sure someone will hit problems once a few orders of magnitude more people are using it, but most people won't.

Several benchmarks have shown that popular x86 apps running in Rosetta on the M1 still run faster than running on native x86 on other machines, so it's probably not going to be an issue.