There’s some great discussion in the comments section of the article The Case for ARM-Based Macs – TidBITS. Several of the commenters put their finger on one of the issues I haven’t seen much if any discussion about:
In the past fifteen years, a lot of developers have moved to Mac because it provides an X86+unix environment, which is a huge boon when developing software which will eventually deploy to a cloud environment, where Linux on X86 is king. The differences between BSD and Linux notwithstanding, this has made the Mac the machine of choice for a huge community of web and open source developers. We can even use tools like VMware, Virtualbox, Docker, and Kubernetes to mimic our target deployment environments.
This is definitely the case across the sciences, including several areas that overlap with my own work. Being able to install and run various bioinformatics tools and/or image analysis packages locally has allowed me to get a better handle on how these tools work. I presume that an architecture change to ARM-based CPUs will still permit most of these tools to work, but there will almost certainly be a transition cost to recompile and optimize for the new platform. The article Re-engine, Not Re-imagine by Brendan Shanks, puts an optimistic spin on the move, essentially arguing that it can and will be invisible to users. Maybe that’s the time I should look more closely at moving some of these tasks off my local machines and into something like CyVerse or some other cluster-for-hire. As a learner though, I’m hesitant to do this because it introduces another layer of abstraction that I’ve found to have its own problems.
Update: This week’s ATP touches on this concern, about whether a processor change would mean a major disruption to Unix-based programs and tools for science, although they focused on other (non-science) Unix command line tools. Their discussion reminded me that the PowerPC to Intel transition also happened in the Mac OS X era, meaning that many such programs had to be recompiled for the new Intel CPUs, and eventually they were. They also mentioned that many Unix command line programs already run on ARM chips, such as on the Raspberry Pi. So things in active development that are open-source likely will make the move fairly quickly.
Gravitropic 