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Why is Apple Rosetta 2 fast? (2022)

(dougallj.wordpress.com)
172 points fanf2 | 1 comments | 19 Nov 24 21:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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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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astrange ◴[19 Nov 24 23:12 UTC] No.42189071{3}[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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1. albumen ◴[20 Nov 24 08:45 UTC] No.42191934{4}[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.