It drastically saves on memory bandwidth because of the unified memory architecture.In contrast, the GPUs that exist on the Intel-based Macs (AMD, Nvidia and Intel) feature an Immediate Mode Rendering architecture and will only have support from the Metal GPU Family Mac 2.Ĭomparing the two GPU architectures, TBDR has the following advantages: The new GPUs on the Apple Silicon SoC features the efficient Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) architecture that you have been familiar with on iOS devices and will have support from both the Metal GPU Family Apple and Metal GPU Family Mac 2. Finally, you should take advantage of the latest performance tools to make your app run as fast as possible on Apple Silicon. To alleviate some of the tradeoffs Rosetta made to assure compatibility, you are strongly encouraged to start writing your app using the new macOS SDK. On Apple Silicon based Macs the old apps will run via Rosetta without any modifications. Looking at the first stage, on Intel based Macs the apps will still run natively.

Here is a high level description of the migration process: Rosetta will run Metal code directly on the Apple GPU. This year, Apple released the second version of Rosetta to serve the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon.

It was used over a period of 3 years, in OSX versions 10.4 – 10.6 (Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard). If you remember, back in 2006, Apple developed a dynamic binary translator named Rosetta which served a similar purpose: to migrate from PowerPC CPUs to Intel CPUs. Getting your apps ready for Apple Silicon Macs Let’s start with looking at what this migration to Apple Silicon means for Metal. Apple states that by leveraging a unified memory architecture (CPU+GPU), macOS apps will see great performance benefits from frameworks such as Metal which will be fine-tuned for Apple Silicon. The migration from Intel to Apple Silicon will affect the operating system and the Apple frameworks as well, Metal included. Bootcamp might still work with Apple Silicon based Macs since there is an ARM based distribution of Windows used by Microsoft Surface devices. There is no word yet on what will happen to the AMD discrete GPUs or whether eGPUs will continue to be supported in future or not. The new SoC will replace the Intel integrated GPU with Apple’s own GPU in new upcoming Macs. The biggest announcement was the 2-yr plan for migrating from the Intel system on a chip (SoC) to the newly branded Apple Silicon SoC. The new macOS named Big Sur is now version 11. All operating systems had significant design changes. WWDC20 has been an event of major changes.

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