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So it got interesting. ARM based Macs!


borjam

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I just watched today's Apple's "mass". Pretty interesting, the new processors are really efficient as expected. And they have even lowered prices a bit. Not surprised, as Intel prices their processors as they want holding a virtual monopoly.

 

Interesting times coming, especially with those so called "neural" units tailored for machine learning calculations.

 

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I just wonder how long Avid/Pro Tools will drag their feet in terms of supporting it.  It took them almost a year to add Mac OS Catalina support and even now you can't export out to a Quicktime video because they haven't been able to make it work yet in 64bit let alone on an ARM processor.

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11 hours ago, codyman said:

I just wonder how long Avid/Pro Tools will drag their feet in terms of supporting it.  It took them almost a year to add Mac OS Catalina support and even now you can't export out to a Quicktime video because they haven't been able to make it work yet in 64bit let alone on an ARM processor.

 

It should be trivial to recompile (just tick a box so that it generates a fat binary with Intel and ARM code) if your software is somewhat modern. But I guess Pro Tools has a lot of legacy code written for vacuum tube based processors :) The same can happen to other pro audio applications such as Digital Performer, etc. 

 

First benchmarks are out and the results are indeed impressive. 

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/

 

My only disappointment and the reason why I think I will still wait for a year is, the Macbook Pro has just two USB-C/TB ports. 

 

As for fat binaries, I own a NeXT cube and I remember that back in the day NeXT binaries had four versions bundled: Motorola 68000, Sun SPARC, HP PA/RISC and Intel x86.  And after all, Macos X is "NeXTStep NG NT ++++++" ;)

 

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15 hours ago, IronFilm said:

They're far from a monopoly with the way AMD is viciously attacking them.

 

AMD has begun to be a serious threat now, if only. It's funny because the Intel 64 bit instruction set was actually designed by AMD, Intel's option, Itanium (a satirical IT website from the UK called it Itanic) fell into oblivion. 

 

So, benchmarks are out and the new ARM processor surpasses even the fastest Intel based laptops Apple is selling. Interesting times, this will be like the Unix workstation wars with cutthroat competition among DEC, Sun, IBM, HP... 

 

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