- ARM64 was announced in October 2011. Apple was shipping SoCs based on ARM64 only two years later. Apple can do these things very quickly when it wants to.
- Apple had all the info it would need to base a decision on Arm or RISC-V at the time of the decision to leave Intel. It could have delayed a short while to allow the ecosystem to mature if it had wanted to go for RISC-V.
- It controls a large chunk of the ecosystem anyway (LLVM etc).
I really find the idea that Apple - hardly the most open company in the world (to say the least) - is expected to switch ISAs again to RISC-V for no apparent commercial advantage very, very implausible.
I agree Apple probably isn’t switching to RISC-V any time soon. I’m just not buying the story that they looked at it, could have done it, passed on it, and that’s that.
Even in 2022 it may not be wise to start a huge RISC-V project yet for a company like Apple. It’s not mature enough.
I also agree Apple is not an open friendly company. That’s why I think if they do it then it will likely be loaded with proprietary extensions. So it’s not a matter of simply swapping ISAs, it’s completely rethinking the entire stack. That takes time and expertise. The industry isn’t there yet, not at the scale to support what Apple (and others) would like to do.
Fair enough but in that case what’s missing and stopping them now?
Edit: rereading it sounds like you think Apple might want their own (version of) ISA which is reasonable except they already had huge input into A64 and are adding their own extensions already anyway.
It’s possible Arm is the ISA for the next century, with all the others mere footnotes of history, the same way the 8-but micros have become a dead-end in computing history.
- ARM64 was announced in October 2011. Apple was shipping SoCs based on ARM64 only two years later. Apple can do these things very quickly when it wants to.
- Apple had all the info it would need to base a decision on Arm or RISC-V at the time of the decision to leave Intel. It could have delayed a short while to allow the ecosystem to mature if it had wanted to go for RISC-V.
- It controls a large chunk of the ecosystem anyway (LLVM etc).
I really find the idea that Apple - hardly the most open company in the world (to say the least) - is expected to switch ISAs again to RISC-V for no apparent commercial advantage very, very implausible.