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It’s been more than a decade since the late Steve Jobs announced to the world that Apple was transitioning from IBM’s PowerPC chips to Intel’s x86 chips. Fast forward to 2021: Apple is beginning the transition of all of its desktop and laptop computers from x86 Intel chips to its own-designed M1 chip, an ARM-based CPU built entirely by and for Apple.
While ARM processors are not new, Apple is transferring the success it has achieved using ARM in mobile products to notebook and desktop computing environments. I expect that as ARM-based CPUs become more common, there will be a fundamental shift in the way software is written.
Let’s explore why you should even care about the expected speed and cost savings for all your workloads, and why I think ARM will change software writing.As a developer, I think just Apple’s claim that the M1 delivers more performance with less power is fascinating because we are at the pinnacle of new data processing speeds.
Why is the developer community moving to ARM? If you’ve been following the evolution of Apple’s A-series chips used in iOS devices, you know that each chip has become (sometimes significantly) more powerful than its predecessor. It’s no surprise to those of us who think about how to equip our engineering teams that Apple has introduced such powerful chips to the Mac.
We've observed (accidentally, of course) that many developers are using Macs. Currently, they're Intel-based, so they can build and deploy to the same CPUs. But soon, as the M1 chip becomes the de facto standard, ARM processors will be in the hands of more developers.
However, I’m not here to just praise Apple Silicon, because this breakthrough is bigger than Apple. AWS recently launched a new low-cost, high-performance class of EC2 instances powered by its ARM-based Graviton processors. The ARM architecture is the future of CPUs, and other manufacturers will be hot on their heels.
In December last year, Qualcomm President Christiano Amon was interviewed on the Vergecast and talked about the M1:
“The ecosystem is going to change, and this shows that Microsoft and Qualcomm are on the right track. This is about battery life, it’s about connectivity, it’s about differentiating multimedia experiences.”
It’s worth noting that the developer tool space is catching up to ARM. Homebrew, the largest tool in the developer community for managing third-party tools, currently doesn’t support Macs with ARM processors.
Speed and cost savings across workloads
ARM is based on the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture, which is designed to perform a small number of tasks at a higher speed, thereby reducing power consumption. This architecture is obviously ideal for chips in devices such as smartphones and wearables.
ARM's design opens the door to significant cost savings when you move workloads to include continuous integration (CI), in-memory caching, and microservices. When it comes to CPUs for CI/CD, it's all about speed and cost. The secret to speeding up CI/CD workloads is to process the pieces in parallel and run them as quickly as possible without breaking the bank.
Cloud providers have contributed to these cost savings by investing heavily in the speed and performance of ARM processors.
In particular, AWS’s Graviton2 processors claim to deliver 40% better price-performance than comparable x86-64 CPUs. When you consider the highly transient nature of CI tasks, combined with the dynamically scaling cloud provider AWS offers, even small performance improvements can translate into huge savings, especially at scale.
ARM will change the way software is written
With the exception of mobile development, most software runs on either AMD or Intel CPUs. Until now, the biggest obstacle has been the lack of available workstations that developers can use to write ARM-based software. Apple has changed that balance with the introduction of the M1 processor.
Developers are already seeing unexpected benefits from their new M1 devices, from being able to reproduce hardware-specific bugs in the pipeline to seeing performance improvements, even when running in x86-64 emulation using Rosetta 2.
I think that by the end of 2022, developers will be building and deploying to ARM. In fact, Adobe has already led the way by releasing ARM software in its Creative Suite, and more and more companies are releasing ARM or M1-friendly software every day.
ARM's architecture is designed to transform edge computing, data server centers, machine learning applications, etc. Some people speculate that all software will have to be rewritten due to Apple's changes. I don't think this is the case, but the team will need to do some recompiling.
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