Hector Martin

Now if they can come up with something that competes in the same class as a PS5 SoC (to give a baseline x86 design by a competent company, because Intel have been failing for years), *then* things will get really interesting. But today is not that day.

What we're seeing right now is Apple stretching the mobile/tablet market segment hardware, which they've gotten *very* good at, to encroach on Intel's ultraportable/embedded segment, which they've sucked at. Logical. Now can they go higher? We'll see.

Oh yeah, and One More Thing. Rosetta 2 *necessarily* uses more RAM than native execution. You need to keep the ARM JIT/AoT code/caches *and* the x86 code around, and probably some overhead on redundant JITting too etc. Now consider the 16GB limitation on top of that.

Very smart people have been doing high-perf emulation (yes it's emulation, *every* modern emulator uses dynamic translation and has for over a decade) for a long time. There is no such thing as "transpiling an x86 app into ARM". It's just not a solvable problem.

Oh there is look at @_revng

I fail to see your point. I know decompilers exist. You cannot take decompiler output, recompile it, and get a working app out the other side (except in very simple cases), *especially* not cross-architecture.

We've been working on fully-static, fully-dynamic and hybrid binary translators. Each solution has its pros/cons, but you can do an effective job. The only real mistake here is that Apple should have called those @_revng guys for the job.

Fully static recompilation is not a generally solvable problem for unconstrained CPU architectures (see: self-modifying code, among others), so you can skip the marketing bullshit with me, thanks.