Comment by poemxo
6 months ago
I usually agree with Apple but I don't agree with this. Rosetta 28 is basically magic, why would they take away one of their own strongest features? If they want big name apps to compile to Apple Silicon, why can't they exert pressure through their codesigning process instead?
The “big name apps” have already moved to Apple Silicon. Rosetta helped them with that process a few years ago. We’re down to the long tail apps now. At some point, Rosetta is only helping a couple people and it won’t make sense to support it. I just looked, and right now on my M1 Air, I have exactly one x86 app running, and I was honestly surprised to find that one (Safari plug-in). Everything else is running ARM. My workload is office, general productivity, and Java software development. I’m sure that if you allow your Mac to report back app usage to Apple, they know if you’re using Rosetta or not, and if so, which apps require it. I suspect that’s why they’re telegraphing that they are about ready to pull the plug.
How do you check if you're running any x86 apps?
1. From the Apple menu, click "About This Mac."
2. In the resulting window, click the "More Info..." button. This will open the System Settings window.
3. Scroll to the bottom of that window and click "System Report."
4. In the left side of the resulting window, under "Software," click "Applications." This will provide a list of installed applications. One of the columns for sorting is "Kind"; all apps that are x86 will be listed with the kind, "Intel."
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To see what’s running,
1. Go into Activity Monitor
2. From the CPU or memory tab, look at the “Kind” column. It’ll either say “Apple” or “Intel.” If the Kind column isn’t visible, right-click on the column labels and select Kind.
In macOS 26, you can see every Rosetta app that has recently run on your machine by going to System Information and then Software / Rosetta Software. It includes the "Fallback Reason" (e.g. if you manually forced the app under Rosetta or if it was an Intel-only binary).
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There's this Silicon app that scans your disk for them: https://github.com/DigiDNA/Silicon.
How much die area does it use that could be used for performance? How much engineering time does it use? Does it make sense to keep it around, causing ~30% more power usage/less performance?
There are many acceptable opposing answers, depending on the perspective of backwards compatibility, cost, and performance.
My naive assumption is that, by the time 2027 comes around, they might have some sort of slow software emulation that is parity to, say, M1 Rosetta performance.
Rosetta is a software translation layer, not a hardware translation layer. It doesn't take any die space.
Hardware acceleration [1]:
> One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC. The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
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