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Comment by ridiculous_fish | Hacker News Reader

While we know that the current chips are ARM-based, Apple is very deliberately calling it "Apple Silicon," perhaps to avoid committing to any particular ISA. An interesting question is how far Apple Silicon will diverge from ARM64. We know there are extensions like AMX already.

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I think Apple call it that simply for brand reasons. They may also avoid committing to any particular ISA as you said, but that's in parallel.

There are no extensions for developers to directly program against.

I think some of that may depend on external factors.

If AWS Graviton or Microsoft ARM significantly grows then it might force Apple to be aligned with ARM64 but just with their own extensions. Because one of the big blockers for developers during the transition to M1 was having all of the CLI tools being available. And they were only available on day one because of demand from AWS users etc.

Standard disclaimer: I work at AWS in Professional Services, all opinions are my own.

It really doesn’t matter. Most applications are written in non native languages like Node, C#, Java, and Python.

If you have native dependencies, even if you are on the same architecture, you’re going to run into issues developing and building packages if if isn’t the same operating system.

Simple case of building Lambdas on none Amazon Linux operating system is just add —use-containers when using the Serverless Application Model.

Other cases, I’ve had to build on Cloud 9 instances.

Lots of big applications including the Adobe Suite use assembly optimizations for performance.

I am curious. Is that allowed as part of ARM's licensing? It would be surprising that ARM is okay with that, unless Apple bullied them into allowing them to call and market it as Apple silicon.

Apple co-founded ARM, so they almost certainly have a custom deal/licensing terms.

Qualcomm calls their ARM chips Snapdragon. Samsung calls their's Exynos. Mediatek calls their's Dimensity.

ARM doesn't care what you call them.

And since everyone calls them something other than ARM, there's not much brand value in calling something "ARM". Might as well call it "Apple silicon".

That's a good point. Sort of interesting.

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