Comment by fsckboy
18 hours ago
>Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
Apple silicon has features specifically designed for macOS or software running on macOS. e.g.: Rosetta 2.
From Wikipedia:
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.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
ya but that one is usable on linux, here is a real world project taking advantage of it: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/pull/2665
you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
The reason Apple has the in house ability to run on multiple chip systems is because of their history going all the way back to Next and that little handheld from the early 1990s under Scully and all their work with Motorola and IBM over the years, that ability is what separates them from Microsoft who is having trouble getting Windows working with multiple CPU chips. Apple is simply better at it.
Windows in the 90s was ported from x86 to MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and SPARC.
i wonder if this is not something that asahi could eventually make use of
edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/