

Apple intern's thesis leaks secret project to port Mac OS X to ARM processors - United857
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/07/apple_intern_thesis_leaks_secret_project_to_port_mac_os_x_to_arm_processors.html

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martin_k
Apple has had Darwin on ARM processors for quite some time. It's called iOS.
The cited project was porting Darwin to a certain ARMv5 chip. I don't know a
lot about the ARM architecture, but from what I understand the original iPhone
was already run by an ARMv6 and ARMv5 is pretty obsolete. So this can hardly
be interpreted as part of a serious effort to port OS X to ARM.

~~~
shareme
it was a false flag/fake project..to see if the engineer was trust-worthy..do
think the thesis would have been published outside if Apple was serious about
the project? Its secretive Apple after all..

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meric
It's an open secret Apple keeps its options open. I just 'knew' they would
have such a project after I read they bought P.A. Semi years ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693>

Soon. :)

~~~
masklinn
> Soon. :)

I'd still expect you to be wrong, iOS apps are unworkable on OSX and ARM
processors, being significantly less powerful (though more efficient) than
x86, would have a hard time translating x86 instructions to ARMv7 (à la
Rosetta) with any kind of acceptable performances. ARMv7 also has very little
support for 64b, which Lion mandates (dropped support for x86 and requires
x86-64 instead) and ARMv8 is nowhere near ready for production chains.

There would be very little to be gained from putting an ARM chip in an Air,
and pretty much everything to be lost. Asking for that feels like pointless
wankery.

~~~
lallysingh
I'd expect that any such machine would be released as an extended iPad line,
with OS X running a compat layer for iOS apps. Apps could theoretically ship
as fat binaries (/again/) to work on both, but that much seems like quite a
jump --- people can buy laptops now, with great battery life. It's the
simplicity of iOS that drives its appeal.

~~~
United857
In fact, the iOS Simulator used by developers today is pretty much just that,
with the iOS app itself + the Cocoa Touch frameworks running within a OS X
process. The only difference is that simulator app builds are specially
compiled for X86 instead of ARM (thus, it's not a "emulator" in the strictest
sense of the word).

With ARM, it'd be conceivably possible for the same iOS binary to run on both
the device and the desktop simulator.

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bwarp
iOS is a pretty big chunk of OS X running on ARM already I understand.

I think this is very unsurprising.

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spiralpolitik
Given the switch from PowerPC to Intel its unsurprising that Apple is keeping
itself options open. I suspect that if Intel doesn't deliver the power
consumption/performance ratio that Apple needs they would happily switch to a
processor that does.

Given that at one point NeXTStep supported 4 different processor architectures
(Motorola, Intel, Sparc, HP) the underlying system is probably one of the
"easier" operating systems to port to new processor architectures.

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feralchimp
This is a lot less of a "secret project leak" than someone discussing the
ideal/advanced fast track to _really_ learning how to kick ass in his new job.

Q:"This new kid is bright; what should we give him to cut his teeth on the
weird stuff?"

A:"Break it at a low level and let him fix it."

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wmf
I wonder if Apple is considering switching the AirPort/Time Capsule family to
OS X; they're based on Marvell processors AFAIK.

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Craiggybear
I wasn't aware this was a secret. I thought Apple were planning an ARM build
of OS X for a while, or had at least been discussing it.

And what with iOS evolving as it is, they probably think a full port of OS X
to ARM is kind of pointless now.

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nextparadigms
This is the beginning of the end for Intel. It would've been anyway, but Apple
has such a strong influence in the tech industry (considering everyone wants
to copy them), that now every manufacturer will start gradually preferring the
ARM architecture over x86 for "ultrathin" laptops with very long battery life
and "good enough" performance, that are also less expensive than the Intel
ones.

~~~
leoedin
It's going to be a long time before desktop OS's running on ARM are as
accepted as they are on x86, simply because of software compatibility. Apple's
probably in better shape on that front (having already moved architectures
once, and so having more of a system to include a compatibility layer), but
users are going to be questioning why 95% of their software doesn't run, or
runs very slowly, on their new and expensive laptop.

The middle ground is something like a Chromebook, which gets around the
problem by not running any legacy apps. However, despite what Google thinks
there's a lot of utility in a laptop outside of the browser, and people who
have software that they need to run will not be moving over to ARM for a long
time.

~~~
nextparadigms
If people were willing to buy netbooks, they will be willing to buy something
like this, too, which should even work better than Windows 7 on a single core
Atom.

I agree that Chromebook should've done this a long time ago. But I wonder if
they think Cortex A9 was subpar, and they're just waiting for Cortex A15 to do
it. A $200 Tegra 3 Chromebook would've still been more appealing than a dual
core Atom $400 one.

