Good emulators make running code written for a different architecture tolerable, even reasonable, but there’s an inevitable latency and performance impact when performing code translation. No word on what the performance hit for emulating in this fashion is, but we don’t expect miracles. Developers will be able to port their applications seamlessly, but apps that aren’t ported will still run in emulation using a dynamic just-in-time system named Rosetta 2. Both of these would be enormous improvements, but the claimed gain is large enough to take with a grain of salt.Īpple showed off multiple application builds at the event, including Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Word, and Excel all running on Apple silicon. Cost savings are supposedly in the 40-60 percent range. Analyst Ming-chi Kuo believes Apple will introduce a 13-inch MacBook Pro with performance 50-100 percent above an equivalent Intel CPU, powered by a 12-core processor. PCMag reports that the actual differential could be enormous.
The company is giving itself some wiggle room as far as where the new parts will fall, and how they’ll compare to previous chips, while still forecasting a general improvement. The blue-highlighted area in Apple’s graph is larger than either the “Desktop” or “Laptop” box.
