Apple will switch to ARM processors: what does it mean for plugin developers?

[machinesworking]

You cannot possibly be serious? Every choice you make speaks volumes as to what sort of person you are. I'd go so far as to say that who we are is the sum total of all the choices we make.

I'll give you this though, I think you believe your choice of computers says a lot about you as a person. You've bought into an archetype about this choice. You think you're smarter than other people because of the choices you've made. It's entirely true also that a lot of Apple users think the same thing. <This of course drives you nuts, because it's the same level of unreasonable directed at your choices.

What you can't understand is why anyone would make a different choice than you. This is why I said it says a lot about you. You seem to literally live in a world where there is a right and a wrong, no shades of grey and no better choice for the specific job allowed.

[IncarnateX]

I was just reporting my experience, as a developer.

And thanks for that, mate. And yes, there are different experiences to share, and it is actually informative to see some devs disagreeing about it. Let people conclude what they want and go fight their own wars. A report from the field is a report from the field.

[BONES]

My choices in politics and religion say a lot about who I am.

No more than where you buy your groceries and much less than the car you drive, your hairstyle or the clothes you wear. Just because you don't realise this doesn't make it any less true.

My choices in architecture, cars, chairs, computers, candy, and outdoor sports are as superficial as it gets.

It is those superficial choices, thos eyo umake below the conscious level, that tend to reveal the most.

Next I expect you're going to claim as a Taurus, ENTP, and proud Australian, you're choice in DAW was obviously going to be Cubase.

I am none of those things so the conclusion would not be valid. I am a New South Welshman or Sydney Harbour Bridginie (a term I have tried to popularise with little success), I do not think of myself as Australian, proudly or otherwise.

I'll give you this though, I think you believe your choice of computers says a lot about you as a person. You've bought into an archetype about this choice.

Not "a lot" but certainly something. It says I take nothing for granted and do my research before every purchase. My last 8 laptops have been from 6 different vendors - Sony, Dell, Samsung, Microsoft, Asus and Acer. To be fair, I don't always make the best decision about what kind of machine I need but having made that decision, I always get the best machine within that selection set.

You think you're smarter than other people because of the choices you've made.

No, I know I am smarter than 99.5% of the population. I have testing results that prove it.

It's entirely true also that a lot of Apple users think the same thing. <This of course drives you nuts, because it's the same level of unreasonable directed at your choices.

It hardly "drives me nuts" but it certainly creates a perception about how much thought goes into their purchasing decisions.

What you can't understand is why anyone would make a different choice than you.

No, there are three things I don't understand. First, why people would put so little effort into an important choice. Second, why they would trust a huge multinational company to have their best interest at heart. Third, why they would think they could hope to justify that decision by piling shit on the very rational choices of others when they are speaking from a position of ignorance (see first point).

You seem to literally live in a world where there is a right and a wrong, no shades of grey and no better choice for the specific job allowed.

The only binaries I see are the reality in which we actually live and the fantasy land a lot of you seem to think you live in. So it's more like "correct perception" and "invalid perception", where there can be no grey areas. You either see the world for what it is or you don't.

[machinesworking]

My choices in politics and religion say a lot about who I am.

No more than where you buy your groceries and much less than the car you drive, your hairstyle or the clothes you wear. Just because you don't realise this doesn't make it any less true.

I think you're projecting. You have brand hatred and loyalty, IMO arbitrarily based, I'm sure you would disagree, I don't. I would switch to Windows without too much fuss if Apple made moves that made continuing to use their products more work that learning to troubleshoot Windows issues.

It is those superficial choices, thos eyo umake below the conscious level, that tend to reveal the most.

Hmm, to me choices in products are made for numerous reasons, I'm not a binary thinker, there is no right and wrong answer. The reasons someone chooses a pair of Levis are as varied as the people who wear them, and it's far too generic of an item to get much psychological evidence off of.

Next I expect you're going to claim as a Taurus, ENTP, and proud Australian, you're choice in DAW was obviously going to be Cubase.

I am none of those things so the conclusion would not be valid. I am a New South Welshman or Sydney Harbour Bridginie (a term I have tried to popularise with little success), I do not think of myself as Australian, proudly or otherwise.

You made my point for me here, in spades even.

I'll give you this though, I think you believe your choice of computers says a lot about you as a person. You've bought into an archetype about this choice.

Not "a lot" but certainly something. It says I take nothing for granted and do my research before every purchase. My last 8 laptops have been from 6 different vendors - Sony, Dell, Samsung, Microsoft, Asus and Acer. To be fair, I don't always make the best decision about what kind of machine I need but having made that decision, I always get the best machine within that selection set.

I'll get to this at the end, but let's cut to the chase, you think people who use Apple products are sheep, and it's this sense of absolutism you have that makes you think it's perfectly fine to constantly comment in threads about Apple products how much you hate Apple products. You're more obsessed with them than most people, at the level of Apple devotees that stand in line for the latest iProduct.

You think you're smarter than other people because of the choices you've made.

No, I know I am smarter than 99.5% of the population. I have testing results that prove it.

I will always be amused by this, if you're around enough truly intelligent people you realize they for the most part, think absolutely nothing of it. Aristotle is attributed with the quote "I know that I don't know", and to me this is the litmus test of whether someone is just Aspergers level capable of regurgitating out information, or is capable of critical thinking, about even themselves.

It's entirely true also that a lot of Apple users think the same thing. <This of course drives you nuts, because it's the same level of unreasonable directed at your choices.

It hardly "drives me nuts" but it certainly creates a perception about how much thought goes into their purchasing decisions.

This goes back to your binary thinking. I do not suggest Apple products to people, I suggest the best product for their situation, not mine.

What you can't understand is why anyone would make a different choice than you.

No, there are three things I don't understand. First, why people would put so little effort into an important choice. Second, why they would trust a huge multinational company to have their best interest at heart. Third, why they would think they could hope to justify that decision by piling shit on the very rational choices of others when they are speaking from a position of ignorance (see first point).

Emotional response here, all computers and parts are made by big companies without you personally in mind. You're projecting old arguments here as well, who said your choices were bad for you?

You seem to literally live in a world where there is a right and a wrong, no shades of grey and no better choice for the specific job allowed.

The only binaries I see are the reality in which we actually live and the fantasy land a lot of you seem to think you live in. So it's more like "correct perception" and "invalid perception", where there can be no grey areas. You either see the world for what it is or you don't.

Here's the coup de grace, you wouldn't buy a Mac if Apple came out with 3mm silicon tomorrow that ran everything flawlessly, twice as fast as what Intel offered, and that was competitively priced. You have attributed all the negative elements of this planet to a brand.

You will never buy a Mac, your only purpose in this thread is to attempt to again paint Apple out as the worst thing to happen to computing. You're trolling, and this very fact makes your perception of yourself as flawlessly logical, comical.

[SampleScience]

You are using Maize, right? Have you tried moving the resources out of the plugins? No idea if that could work, but, yeah, uploading 1-3GB and then seeing the notarization fail is no fun indeed.

Yes, I've tried it and it caused all kinds of unforeseen problems. As of now, I'm going to terminate the support for macOS Catalina and move on to Kontakt/Halion. All my plugins are sample-based anyways so the transition should be fairly smooth (hopefully).

[syntonica]

I'm hoping Big Sur removes all the suckiness from Catalina and becomes a proper, upstanding OS. Catalina just seems like a huge kludge...

[machinesworking]

I'm hoping Big Sur removes all the suckiness from Catalina and becomes a proper, upstanding OS. Catalina just seems like a huge kludge...

Every once in a while I feel like I make the right decisions.
This 2012 macbook here is "Catalina capable" but if it's a dud in general I'm parked exactly where I should be OS wise at Mojave. It just misses the cutoff for Big Sur.

[syntonica]

My music/programming/work computer is frozen at Mojave. I have a little Air on Catalina and it's not too bad, but it definitely has huge room for improvement. I'm hoping Big Sur is the Snow Leopard to Catalina's Leopard.

[machinesworking]

My music/programming/work computer is frozen at Mojave. I have a little Air on Catalina and it's not too bad, but it definitely has huge room for improvement. I'm hoping Big Sur is the Snow Leopard to Catalina's Leopard.

Yeah I modded the fuk out of the 09 Mac Pro here. People talk about being able to put Catalina on it, but I learned a long time ago, whatever is the minimum requirement, means it barely works. High Sierra was the real game changer here, since it meant native NVME SSD support, and Mojave has dark mode, which makes me happy. Just wish DAW developers actually bothered to code it.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

All these changes are extremely dependent on the products to be converted for each manufacturer.

I think there is no "it will be simple" or "it will be difficult" answer.

For example, if one used libraries that cannot be easily recompiled for silicon the project will be more difficult. If someone has directly or indirectly hundreds of executables to recompile or translate (maybe because they have a lot of products, or because the protection mechanism leads to some sort of recompilation explosion) it will be difficult.

Like any change, we'll always see a random developer say "I just had to change a flag and it all worked out fine right away", but we'll see others that may have a year of development. This will happen also for opengl: in my case I don't use it and it will be a click, but maybe for others it will be a complex porting that will require a difficult tuning, because for example they will have to retest everything.

For this year's case, let's say that nothing could have happened with a more devastating impact: it changes the processor, and it literally changes everything, even the threading mechanism. Apple has been honest, saying that if a developer is linking system frameworks and uses little low-level programming (threading, events, assembler, jit compilation) the impact will be minimal. But averaging for all developers, the impact will obviously be great. It won't be a big impact for everyone, and the fact that it's easier for someone doesn't say anything about their code quality, programming strategy and so on.

As usual, I think it's worth waiting to see the real impact of this porting, even on a personal level. Even the companies that currently release products for iOS may have problems: maybe they can easily convert many applications but not all of them. For some people time may be crucial, sometimes it is not even a question of feasibility.

This can be applied to Catalina for example: signing a plugin is not a complex requirement, but maybe a company has a download manager and new issues can arise. I read with surprise some developers who explained that they did everything in a few clicks showing us their skill, without realizing that it is not always a matter of skill: sometimes a new requirement involves a hell of a job. Given the speed of change on the platform I'd say it's a spinning wheel: sooner or later he'll be faced with a new requirement that takes months off his productivity too.

[quikquak]

Personally, I look forward to seeing how fast these chips will go, I've always loved Arm, and I think it's about time it was used commercially in something other than a device or a web-surfing laptop.

[syntonica]

I'm curious to see how different code size is and optimization is. ARM + Neon vs. X86-64 + SSE. Fight!

(Off to read about Neon...)

[joshb]

For those interested, I just received my DTK from Apple and compiled my production plugin as a universal. It loaded and played perfectly in Logic and MainStage without changing one line of code. FWIW, I use JUCE as a framework.

Hope that's helpful for someone.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

As I said before, if you only use system frameworks porting is really a click.

Unfortunately for many people it will be a slow transition and for the user a problem at various levels, so it is right to remain cautious, even if only for users who read this forum

In our experience with the dtk, reaper-intel doesn't work, for example. I was curious to see how they loaded some sequencers in Intel mode: has anyone found a sequencer that loads vst-intel for testing?

Pace today announced a porting of the only Fusion Factory in beta for the end of the year. Given the work that needs to be done, we will realistically see protools-silicon next year. I would be really surprised to see it sooner.

One of the difficulties with silicon is not being able to mix arm and Intel in the same project or between frameworks according to Apple documentation, so I guess they need to recompile in the case. In some cases you'll need to migrate, I'm thinking for example to those using Intel ipp or mlk (libraries that obviously won't be available on arm)

I have a question about kfr if anyone knows it: I saw that it is optimized for armv7 but there is no reference to armv8 and later: are these optimizations so important?

[Urs]

(Off to read about Neon...)

I'll have a go at it in 2-3 weeks, but from a glance at the instruction set I think NEON has everything that SSE has, and much more. Kind of paradox that a RISC platform has the more complex and thorough implementation of this concept than the CISC one.