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June 27, 2020 01:25 am

Rosetta 2 is Apple's Key To Making the ARM Transition Less Painful

At WWDC 2020 earlier this week, Apple announced that it's moving Macs away from Intel processors to its own silicon, based on ARM architecture. To help ease the transition, the company announced Rosetta 2, a translation process that allows users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon. The Verge reports: Rosetta 2 essentially "translates" instructions that were written for Intel processors into commands that Apple's chips can understand. Developers won't need to make any changes to their old apps; they'll just work. (The original Rosetta was released in 2006 to facilitate Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel. Apple has also stated that it will support x86 Macs "for years to come," as far as OS updates are concerned. The company shifted from PowerPC to Intel chips in 2006, but ditched support for the former in 2009; OS X Snow Leopard was Intel-only.) You don't, as a user, interact with Rosetta; it does its work behind-the-scenes. "Rosetta 2 is mostly there to minimize the impact on end-users and their experience when they buy a new Mac with Apple Silicon," says Angela Yu, founder of the software-development school App Brewery. "If Rosetta 2 does its job, your average user should not notice its existence." There's one difference you might perceive, though: speed. Programs that ran under the original Rosetta typically ran slower than those running natively on Intel, since the translator needed time to interpret the code. Early benchmarks found that popular PowerPC applications, such as Photoshop and Office, were running at less than half their native speed on the Intel systems. We'll have to wait and see if apps under Rosetta 2 take similar performance hits. But there are a couple reasons to be optimistic. First, the original Rosetta converted every instruction in real-time, as it executed them. Rosetta 2 can convert an application right at installation time, effectively creating an ARM-optimized version of the app before you've opened it. (It can also translate on the fly for apps that can't be translated ahead of time, such as browser, Java, and Javascript processes, or if it encounters other new code that wasn't translated at install time.) With Rosetta 2 frontloading a bulk of the work, we may see better performance from translated apps. The report notes that the engine won't support everything. "It's not compatible with some programs, including virtual machine apps, which you might use to run Windows or another operating system on your Mac, or to test out new software without impacting the rest of your system," reports The Verge. "(You also won't be able to run Windows in Boot Camp mode on ARM Macs. Microsoft only licenses the ARM version of Windows 10 to PC manufacturers.) Rosetta 2 also can't translate kernel extensions, which some programs leverage to perform tasks that macOS doesn't have a native feature for (similar to drivers in Windows)."

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