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Why is Apple Rosetta 2 fast? (2022)

(dougallj.wordpress.com)
172 points fanf2 | 9 comments | 19 Nov 24 21:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.433s | source | bottom
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leshokunin ◴[19 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42188818[source]▶
Super interesting. Putting my PM hat on, I wonder: how many x86 apps on Apple still benefit from this much performance? What's the coverage? The switch to M1 happened 4 years ago, so the software was designed for hardware nearly half a decade old.

Excellent engineering and nice that it was built properly. Is this something that Linux / Wine / the Steam compatibility layer already benefit from?

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aaomidi ◴[19 Nov 24 22:40 UTC] No.42188853[source]▶
Games. So many games.

Also, x86 containers.

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1. jsheard ◴[19 Nov 24 22:42 UTC] No.42188857[source]▶
Then again games didn't stop Apple from dropping x86-32 support, which nuked half of the Mac Steam library. It wouldn't be out of character for them to drop x86-64 support and nuke the rest which haven't been updated to native ARM.
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2. p_l ◴[19 Nov 24 22:50 UTC] No.42188930[source]▶
For games on intel macs they had fallback of BootCamp so combined with not really caring about games outside of random bursts like support for Unity, they were fine telling people to run windows. (ironically, the only Mac I owned ran faster under windows than under macOS...)
3. darknavi ◴[19 Nov 24 23:11 UTC] No.42189063[source]▶
Or OpenGL support
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4. astrange ◴[19 Nov 24 23:12 UTC] No.42189071[source]▶
Developers had something like 15 years of warning before x86-32 was dropped, which was enough for everyone except Carbon apps and games.

Btw, Rosetta 2 actually supports x86-32. Which means you can run 32-bit Windows binaries through WINE, just not Mac 32-bit binaries.

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5. saagarjha ◴[20 Nov 24 00:14 UTC] No.42189495[source]▶
Rosetta supports it at least. You can run Linux 32-bit games!
6. rdsnsca ◴[20 Nov 24 00:38 UTC] No.42189653[source]▶
OpenGL was deprecated, not removed from macOS.
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7. Gigachad ◴[20 Nov 24 02:08 UTC] No.42190201[source]▶
The problem with games is most of them are completed projects and no longer actively worked on, unlike software which is a never ending development on a single project.

So if you kill support for an old game, it will probably never be updated since it's no longer commercially relevant. Publishers are probably almost happy when old games get broken since they can sell you newer ones easier.

8. albumen ◴[20 Nov 24 08:45 UTC] No.42191934[source]▶
Re games, I've tried running Black Mesa recently 'directly' using Crossover on an M2 Max running Sequoia and the GPTK2 beta libraries; vs running it in a Win11 VM in VMware fusion 13. Performance of the latter is 2-3x better (70-120fps). I'll be playing old Steam games inside the win11 VM going forward.
9. adrian_b ◴[20 Nov 24 12:39 UTC] No.42193407{3}[source]▶
But Apple has never implemented the final specification of OpenGL.

So even if they have kept the old OpenGL version that they had, many newer OpenGL-based applications cannot run on MacOS.

Since OpenGL is no longer evolving, it would not have been a great effort to bring the OpenGL support to the last version, and only then freeze it.