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Comment by BillinghamJ | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I doubt it. Just as investments into macOS support don't typically help Linux much.

It'd be awesome if Apple would let Raspberry Pi use their M1 chips, but clearly that's never going to happen!

I think what OP is suggesting isn't so much that Pis will use M1 chips, more that right now typically many applications are unavailable as prebuikt binaries for arm64, and maybe having more arm processors in the wild will make that situation change.

I just switched to the starship shell prompt on my mac, for example, and I tried to install it on my Pi as well, but there's no prebuilt binary for Pi, and after an hour or so I gave up trying to build it myself. :P

Problem with Linux is that in order to support arm you don't just have to build for the architecture but also for a specific distribution and version.

This depends on the language too.

This especially won't happen because from Apple's perspective, that's way too similar to a Mac mini. The Mac mini just has an aluminum enclosure, heatsink, and fan. Remove those three things, downclock the CPU (if possible), and you've got a close equivalent.

You could rip an M1 chip out of a Mac, but then you have the problem that there are no publicly available device drivers for many of the peripherals integrated on to the chip, such as the proprietary Apple GPU cores, neural engine and probably also things like the thunderbolt and other interface components. Also how does the kernel manage things like the BIGLittle cpu architecture, power management systems, etc.

What could be very interesting though is emulating a Pi on an M1 Mac in virtualisation.

I seriously doubt Apple will allow others to use their secret sauce. Still, more people using ARM software will certainly result in better tested libraries and tools. Intel got where it is now by having a machine on pretty much every developer's desk (it can be said that SPARC and MIPS got where they are now by having an x86 on every developer's desk too). When a lot of developers have ARM boxes on their desks, a lot of software will be written for ARM first and ported to x86 as an afterthought - or, more accurately as Apple's tooling goes, built for ARM and x86 but only tested on ARM.

It would be awesome, but one of the great things about Raspberry Pis is how inexpensive they are, and I think the M1 is probably pretty expensive—even for Apple.

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