Macintosh moving to ARM

[JFreak]

Why? Because last transition, I am fairly sure you remember that. The developer box they sent back then was just as capable as anything for sale at that time.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Why? Because last transition. I am fairly sure you remember that. The developer box they sent back then was just as capable as anything for sale at that time.

Why? Because they likely don't have a way to connect Thunderbolt to the ARM based chip yet. It's largely based on current iPad silicon stuck in a box they conveniently had... The iPad doesn't have Thunderbolt support. I expect Apple will not want to base future USB 4 Thunderbolt support on current Intel *ridge chipsets... so even kitbashing Titan Ridge etc. based Thunderbolt into a ARM box today would not help developers. If they had Thunderbolt they would be saying so, I doubt Apple is so stupid as to accident forget to mention that huge thing.

You really to stop answering everything with "because this is how it happened sometime in the past" and actually think more about at what is going on now.

[JFreak]

We can agree to "we shall see" and also I agree that you should never plan the future by the past. I am just assuming they wanted to do this ARM thing with Catalina already but 3rd parties wanted extra year. Apple may be pretty well prepared.

[Righty27]

Apple will doubtless have made provision for the transition phases that big developers such as Avid, whose whole business is dependent on Apple compatibility to a degree, should be able to readily accommodate ... even if it could potentially get bumpy, I guess!

My question is if/how this will change to ARM processors might affect smaller plugin/VI developers who maybe lack the resources or capacity to make big changes. Are they affected also ... just a recompile ... or major rewrites resulting in upgrade fees and many inevitably being left behind by existing customers who will not want to effectively buy everything again in order to maintain compatibility?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Righty27

Apple will doubtless have made provision for the transition phases that big developers such as Avid, whose whole business is dependent on Apple compatibility to a degree, should be able to readily accommodate ... even if it could potentially get bumpy, I guess!

My question is if/how this will change to ARM processors might affect smaller plugin/VI developers who maybe lack the resources or capacity to make big changes. Are they affected also ... just a recompile ... or major rewrites resulting in upgrade fees and many inevitably being left behind by existing customers who will not want to effectively buy everything again in order to maintain compatibility?

Yes the answer might be a simple recompile, or it might be major work, nobody here can guess. But my concern would not be as much as the code of the plugins directly and more things like OpenGL support. That stuff should hopefully be fairly quick for Avid and plugin developer partners to see if it is an issue or not.

I'm not sure that Apple would do much specific for Avid, or really need to from their perspective. There would be many hundreds of companies more important to Apple in line ahead of Avid. I expect most pain and issues are likely going to be on Avid side, if for example old technology like OpenGL that Pro Tools is reliant upon which Apple is depreciating suck on Big Sur on ARM then hopefully Avid tries to work around problems. Otherwise they get on board with Metal, and force plugin developers to move, at significant work. Hopefully that's not needed, but OpenGL support and performance on Big Sur/ARM is an obvious curiosity. And lots of folks might dependent on OpenGL, but their applications are not ultra-latency/CPU glitch sensitive like Pro Tools is. The next obvious question are things related to security (because Apple is unlikely to back off those) and when/how Thunderbolt interface developers get systems to work on, since it looks like the current developer boxes don't have Thunderbolt support. The folks who actually know if this stuff is easy or hard or working OK will be Avid and its plugin developers, unfortunately Avid's typical lack of communications will mean even if its going well most folks here won't get to know. I'd love for Avid to get out of the 1980s and work out how to communicate as a technology company to its customers.

[AE]

hard to believe an ARM upgrade for the 2019 Mac Pro won't be available; apple is not likely to engineer yet another Mac Pro during the reported two year transition and it is a more modular design than in past models. plus apple silicon must have been in the works prior to release new MP, so you'd think the upcoming developments would have been considered. but who knows?

it's a drag to be in limbo, but my instinct at this point is to delay purchase of a new tower until we see how pro tools fares on the first ARM machines. knowing avid this should work by... 2024?

[GoButtonGuy]

A couple of things all public knowledge none of it subject to the dev NDA...

Apple isn't giving devs the the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kits. We license them for $500 then have to return them. My request hasn't gone through yet so I don't have the return details. Last time they did this for PPC to Intel they gave everyone that give back the dev box an Intel Mac.

Thunderbolt 3 on a Mac uses a USB-C connector. The wire can transmit USB or Thunderbolt. The physical connection is with a USB-C connector while the protocol is Thunderbolt 3.

The transition isn't just a microprocessor. It's a complete system on a chip or SoC. It's been the way scalable computing has been going for the last several years. The topology and architecture is different than a monolithic design of modern Intel or AMD processors. It's more like a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone but more powerful. An advantage is that the cores of the Apple A series are able to be load/task maximized. For example you can have four cores, two for more typical or mundane types of operations and two more optimized for heavy compute/processing loads. This is more efficient because instead of "standing in line" to execute the tasks are routed to the core optimized for them.

Bootcamp will be discontinued. It's going to be virtualization only through native ARM apps. No more options to boot into another OS (like Windows) at hardware power up. There are new recovery options and the standard boot from a variety of Mac boot disks on the system. There is a demo of native Parallels running ARM Linux. They haven't exactly said how they'll do Windows. Rosetta 2 will not support virtualization apps like Parallels and VMWare.

Rosetta 2 is different than the last one in that instead of it translating at runtime it translates at install time for the non native app. It can still execute at runtime for anything that didn't get translated or needs JIT. There was a demo of Intel based Maya and one of the Tomb Raider games under Rosetta 2 on one of the DTK boxes. Looks promising.

I'm looking forward to see if 2020.5 will run on Apple Silicon Big Sur with Rosetta 2 once I get a DTK. I've got Big Sur Intel on an APFS container but 2020.5 on another container won't boot. Not that I expected it to. It's probably going to be a month or two before Big Sur is usable for doing anything except building your own app for the transition. Usually the OS isn't ready for somewhat normal use until the public betas start appearing. Before then it's to make sure your own house is in order.
EDIT: contrary to what I posted earlier no Thunderbolt on the DTK, USB-C

[rmccam]

I can't say that I fully understand the details or ramifications of everything mentioned here but, for me anyway, it really just comes down to "how long will I be able to run my new 2019 Mac Pro for?" I'm sure others who've made the sizeable investment would agree. I mean, it's only been officially supported for a month and there are still plugins that I can't use because developers haven't released a version that works on Catalina (ie. CEDAR DNS).

Back when we were on PowerPC and that shift happened, software wasn't subscription based, so you could at least lock your computer in its present state. You can of course do that now but you're then dealing with either paying for a subscription you're not using, or paying the price of reinstating/upgrading your licenses once you finally need to upgrade.

I do wish that I hadn't needed to upgrade my computer this year but hopefully Apple has some path to help the pro market out amidst this transition.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by rmccam

I do wish that I hadn't needed to upgrade my computer this year

I am thinking you will thank yourself later.

[rmccam]

Originally Posted by JFreak

I am thinking you will thank yourself later.

Interesting take. It's quite possible that the next Mac Pro will be 4+ years away and the migration over to these new chips will be a complete clusterf*ck.

I'm assuming that's what you mean? Ha Ha!