Bloomberg: Apple looking at moving to ARM chips for Mac

[JoelMussman]

What will be the VMware response to the Bloomberg report that Apple is seriously looking at a move to ARM for the Mac product line? Where will that leave VMware Fusion? Will Fusion be revamped to pretend to be an Intel chip so intel-compiled software can run? Or will Fusion just go away and we will be back to the Mac of the 1980's?

I realize that some folks may think this question a bit premature, but I would like to know the direction that VMware would plan on going if/when it happens.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I didn't catch that change.  I expected it to be an option, but not a wholesale change.  Interesting....

Maybe Apple will open up Rosetta 2 for the hypervisor...but then the question becomes, how long will they support it (I'm sure there are licensing costs, let alone development).

[wila]

Doug,

I think I saw Mike clarify this on twitter first, then he updated the blog.

Here's the relevant snippet:

Big Changes

Big Sur brings with it some really big visual changes, but also major changes under the hood. For instance, Apple has been progressively deprecating 3rd party Kernel Extensions or “kexts” which Fusion needs to run VMs and containers. In order to continue to operate in this model, we’ve re-architected our hypervisor stack to leverage Apple’s native hypervisor APIs, allowing us to run VMs without any kernel extensions.

On macOS Catalina systems, Fusion operates as it always has using kernel extensions to provide functionality. However on Big Sur systems, Fusion operates entirely without kexts.

(read the whole blog post here)

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Wil

[ColoradoMarmot]

Ahh, looks like they're using the hypervisor API's, but not necessarily an apple hypervisor.

I don't have a machine I can run 11 as a host, but it'd be interesting to do a direct performance benchmark between catalina and big sur on the same hardware.

[wila]

Hi,

Ahh, looks like they're using the hypervisor API's, but not necessarily an apple hypervisor.

Thanks, I hadn't even considered to read it like that.

That would actually make sense as VMware offers more features than the apple hypervisor AFAIK and this would be a way to keep those additional features.

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Wil

[Rumboogy]

Its been a few months so I thought I would ping the conversation. 

Now that the new Arm based Macs have been actually release do we have any better insights on if Fusion will support Intel based Windows?  I am trying to decide if I should buy the last of the Intel based Macs to preserve this capability or if there will be a path forward with Arm Macs.

[ColoradoMarmot]

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Fusion-Discussions/VMware-Fusion-12-running-on-Apple-Silico...