[PD-dev] Macs to transition to ARM processors

[Charles Z Henry]

What do you think this will do for the GPU support though?
There are a couple mali architectures now that support OpenGL (
Bifrost https://wiki.debian.org/PanfrostLima )

I'm out of practice, but I was once tinkering with an Allwinner A80
with a PowerVR GPU, and there was OpenGL support in the proprietary
binaries, somewhere....  I gave up.  It does Open GLES and sits in a
drawer until I think of what to do with it

or do you think they'll adopt NVIDIA (like the jetson nano)?  NV
already puts pci-e (some lanes) on its jetsons with arm cores, so in a
few more cycles, maybe there will be enough on-chip to support all the
connectors, network stuff that apple puts on laptops/desktops

And there was that fusion CL/GL API they wanted to put out called
Metal.  I haven't followed along with its progress.  Is it related?

Chuck

On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:25 PM Dan Wilcox <danomatika at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Howdy all,
>
> Apple announced today that it will transition from Intel to its own Arm processors. What this will bring is:
>
> * Universal 2: x86_64 & arm fat binaries
> * Rosetta 2: emulation layer from x86_64 to arm
>
> For Pd, this means that current binaries will most likely *run* but who knows how the performance will be good for realtime DSP. OTOH, they did demo a game and some virtualization support so it seems they have focused on making things run as well as they can.
>
> Building Pd itself for macOS arm should be relatively easy, just a different arch target. For externals, this would may require an additional fat lib type, perhaps dfat_2? Note, I believe the distinction will be important for us since we still have "Universal 1" builds. As with the Pd core, updating pd-lib-builder should also be relatively easy by adding the new arch targets, depending on what they are.
>
> For deken, this means recompiling and uploading the new fat type.
>
> I don't imagine it will be possible to have a "fatter lib" which supports ppc, x86, x86_64, & arm. I believe the writing is on the wall for the eventual need for a build system newer then OS X 10.6.
>
> --------
> Dan Wilcox
> @danomatika
> danomatika.com
> robotcowboy.com
>
>
>
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