Apple has officially announced the transfer of Mac series computers to processors of its own design. CEO Tim Cook called the event "historic for the Mac platform." The transition is expected to be smooth over the course of two years.
With the transition to a platform of its own development, Apple promises a new level of performance and energy efficiency. The company is currently developing its own SoC based on the common ARM architecture, but with unique features designed specifically for Mac.
The company is going to present the first Mac computer based on its own processor platform before the end of this year. In addition, Apple is also going to release already planned, in-development and production computers based on Intel processors. In other words, we are not yet talking about a complete transition to our own platform.
The most important differentiating feature of Apple's new ARM processors will be their native support for iOS and iPadOS apps on macOS in the future. Thus, it will be easier for developers to write and optimize applications for the entire ecosystem of Apple products.
The company is going to adapt its own applications to support the new platform and hopes that other developers will follow suit. For example, Microsoft is already working on adapting its Office suite for new Apple processors. The company also collaborates with Adobe. At the presentation, Apple showed Lightroom and Photoshop applications running on the new platform, demonstrating the smoothness of the interface when running a 5 GB Photoshop PSD file.
In the new operating system announced today there will be a new version of the Rosetta emulator. Previously used by developers to seamlessly transition from PowerPC processors to Intel chips, the new version of Rosetta 2 will be used to seamlessly transition from x86 Intel chips to Apple ARM processors. Thus, it will be possible to develop applications for the new platform even in the conditions of the "old" hardware environment.
For application developers for the new platform, Apple has prepared the Universal App Quick Start Program for a "quick transition", as well as a special Developer Transition Kit - a hardware development kit. It is based on the Mac mini, which has been made a number of changes. In particular, it uses an Apple A12Z Bionic processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD drive. The system is running a beta version of macOS Big Sur. In addition, the Xcode 12 development environment is included.
Participation in the Developer Program is paid. Apple called the amount of $500. You can sign up for .
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Source: 3dnews.ru