This article is from WeChat official account:Love Faner (ID: ifanr), author: Li Chen, from the title figure: vision China

Two days ago, the Mac equipped with the Arm architecture M1 chip was released and sold at the speed of light. Today, the official version of macOS Big Sur was launched.

In terms of hardware and systems, Apple can be said to be very fast, helping you who want to try “Ready OK”. Only in the software ecology you can’t understand it at a glance, and it takes time to verify it step by step.

In Ai Faner’s article the day before yesterday, I have discussed the changes in the performance of the M1 chip and the improved battery life after switching to the Arm platform.

These are important, but the real milestone is that it has subverted Apple’s previous software ecology.

First, Apple gave three sets of solutions to solve the application ecology

Before the iOS software can be used, previous Mac users may be more concerned about what applications are not available.

After the advent of Apple Silicon, Apple’s desktop environment will temporarily split into two camps, Apple Silicon and Intel. Many people are worried about what changes will occur in the application ecosystem.Three different application solutions are given this time.

  • Universal application

  • Rosetta 2 translation application

  • Native Arm application

Now let’s talk about Apple’s three solutions in more detail.

Universal universal applications can span Intel and Apple Silicon platforms, but they may also be the most worrying part, because many Mac users are photographers or work in the film and television industry. It is Lightroom(adapted within the year) and Photoshop(adapted next year) are not available immediately.

According to the previous performance on DTK(Developer Tools Kit ), Adobe currently prohibits all software from being installed on Apple Silicon. Obviously Adobe official It takes time to make some adaptations.

Why can many applications be adapted to Apple Silicon in the first place, while productivity software like Photoshop, which is close to the Mac just needed, has to wait until next year? According to some information found, Adobe’s software such as Photoshop began to use Intel’s mathematical function library Intel Math Kernel Library and other hardware acceleration functions in 2019, so let alone running on Apple Silicon, it actually runs on There will be some problems on AMD processors.

This also shows a certain limitation, that is, Software that relies on the characteristics of Intel processors is difficult to adapt to Apple Silicon immediately. The larger the size, the more software that involves multiple computing models. May depend on Intel processors.

Apple should be aware of this problem, so there should be time reserved for these software developers, but heavy Photoshop users will definitely not buy Mac products equipped with Apple Silicon in the first place.

The second solution is an application recompiled by Rosett2. This is an official Apple tool that can translate applications compiled on the x86 architecture into Arm architecture applications. For most lightweight applications, because it does not involve the characteristics of the processor, it can be easily translated into applications that Apple Silicon can run, or even some relatively large 3D games.

The problem with this approach is that the application will lose some performance after translation, and the amount of this loss may be a matter of concern to many people.

Since there are not enough samples now, it is difficult to say how much performance will be lost on average, but the performance of some specific benchmark software can be quantified and presented, such as GeekBench, which Apple often uses.

On the DTK with A12Z, the Geekbench 5 single-core running score after Rosetta2 translation is about 840 points, and the multi-core score is more than 2900 points. Compared with the performance of running scores on the native iOS platform, it has dropped by about 25%, which is close to the level of i7-4700HQ. The M1 chip will only be stronger, and because there are more running software projects, some sub-projects cannot be translated normally and the performance loss is relatively large. There should be no need to worry about the software performance after the actual translation.

For example, IINA, the best player software on macOS, has been determined to run Rosetta 2 perfectly, and the Canary version of Chrome has been able to open and load web pages normally.