[QGIS-Developer] QGIS for Apple: Intel vs. arm

Wed Jun 24 06:20:01 PDT 2020

Hi

> On 24 Jun 2020, at 11:52, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Peter,
> 
> Thanks for this feedback.
> 
> I remember when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel that they had kind of compatibility/abstraction layer that allowed old software to work on the new intel platform. Are there similar plans with the switch to arm?
> 
> 

Yes they will support application bundles that ship both ARM and Intel architecture (“Universal Binary”) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary

They will continue to support their Intel based machines for years to come (no specific end of life indicated yet that I have seen) but they expect all new hardware to be sold to be based on ARM within 2 years.

I wouldn’t bash Apple on this - Intel have been slow at rolling out small nanometer architectures and the whole world is moving towards ARM - Windows is already available for ARM though they kinda fluffed it. Plus they are a company who likes to periodically advance their platform with breaking changes - just like we did going from QGIS 2 to QGIS 3.

Apple are good at making their developer tools work nicely at compiling software for the hardware they support. Since long ago Marco Bernasocchi started making QGIS ARM friendly, hence QGIS for Android, QField and INPUT.

For me I welcome this - the ARM chips will use less power when under low loads (better green footprint) and the new platform promises being able to run iOS apps directly on macOS so e.g. we can run INPUT straight on the desktop if we want to use a lightweight QGIS (ok yes I know INPUT could already be compiled for macOS but not run using the same package as iOS built one).

Regards

Tim

> Andreas
> 
> Am 24.06.20 um 11:53 schrieb Peter Petrik:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> As building on iOS already works (https://github.com/lutraconsulting/input-sdk/tree/master/ios <https://github.com/lutraconsulting/input-sdk/tree/master/ios>), I imagine it would be possible to  run another architecture build for MacOS with a similar approach. It is in Apple's interest to facilitate transition to developers. To evaluate how hard it would be, that is more tricky at this point. First of all, Qt has to support this new architecture, I haven't found a statement from them yet if they plan it and when. So even Qt supports it (hopefully from Qt5 releases and not Qt6), we have to build all the deps with the new architecture, which takes some time to create recipes. And of course find a hardware where it all can be built (probably another machine , yes). Not saying that it is very frustrating to do development of such a new package if you do not own such hardware yourself...
>> 
>> P. 
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:33 AM Régis Haubourg <regis.haubourg at gmail.com <mailto:regis.haubourg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> Hi Andreas, 
>> I'm also worried about this move.
>> 
>> But one way to forward the cost to Apple is now to stop buying macs. 
>> Sorry to troll, but the vendor lockin' nightmare they are building is not of the same nature as of the powerpc era. 
>> I sold mine because they stopped to support it though it worked very well on the hardware side. And switching to linux on Mac is made hard on purpose.. > never again for me, even if they do really good stuff. 
>> I found in LENOVO some durable hardware, easy to repair, hardware that works nicely and avoid me to trash a working computer.  
>> Best
>> Régis
>> 
>> 
>> Le mer. 24 juin 2020 à 11:11, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net <mailto:a.neumann at carto.net>> a écrit :
>> Hi all, esp. Peter,
>> 
>> So I wonder what the new announcement of Apple switching everything from Intel to arm architecture will mean for our project? According to Apple they will switch all of their devices to arm over the next 2 years.
>> 
>> Will it be a lot of work to adapt the build system to the new processor architecture? It will probably mean that we will need an additional Mac build server for arm architecture in our infrastructure and will have to provide packages for both systems for many years to come ...
>> 
>> Not so nice for us as a project - can we forward these costs to Apple for that move?
>> 
>> Greetings,
>> Andreas
>> 
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Tim Sutton

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