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Comment by sottol | Hacker News Reader

Both Google and Apple have multi-arch support and Apple has pulled off a ISA transitions, guess that really only leaves Apple's investment in the actual M1/M2 chip-design itself.

Apple's price-point and margins are high enough but they're pretty protective of their margins afaik. I wonder if it's worth transitioning away though.

I think this will definitely boost Risc-V investment and maybe other alternatives, if for no other reason than to have a viable threat to leave ARM if they decide to get more aggressive in pricing.

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Apple had a secret x86 port of MacOS System 7 in the early 1990s ("Project Star Trek"). Similarly, Apple continued to maintain a public x86 port of Darwin and a secret port of Mac OS X ("Project Marklar"), prior to Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel. They no doubt have a secret RISC-V port of macOS today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/10/a-bit-of-history-behind... the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"

> They no doubt have a secret RISC-V port of macOS today.

Possibly but as it’s believed they were lead partner for the design of the ARM64 ISA and seem to be able to add their own extensions (as well as designing their own micro architecture) they already have a lot of control in a way they didn’t with 68k and PowerPC.

Then I wouldn't be surprised if they also had a long-term, iron-clad license at fixed cost.

Agreed. Although not the mythical perpetual free license which lots of people seem to assume.

They’d need an actual chip to run it on or is it just simulated? I mean isn’t RISC-V still 5-10 years behind M series?

Also do you think the they still maintain macOS ports for PowerPC?

I doubt Apple still maintains macOS for PowerPC. Building for RISC-V would be to keep future options available, whereas PowerPC is a dead end.

We might look for clues in any Apple contributions to LLVM and Darwin for RISC-V or PowerPC.

I went searching if Darwin still supports PowerPC. I found a Reddit thread about compiling Rust code for Darwin PowerPC, but they only talk about old versions of Darwin:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qbok3d/how_difficult_...

I really doubt they have seriously considered porting macOS to RISC-v though.

It shouldn’t take that long to port darwin to a new arch anyway. And when/IF RISC-V actually becomes even close to being competitive to ARM/x86 it will probably be very different than it is now.

Yes but the OS is just one thing, there are lots and lots of other applications beyond that, that they would need to port.

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