Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
This is a shocking development.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
Why are you demanding a user does that for free instead of the big corp that made the platform?
b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
But Intel and AMD post documents to explain how to use their hardware. Apple doesn’t. So it’s not an equivalent effort by any stretch.