top | item 46939788

(no title)

xphos | 21 days ago

Well x86 at one point, arm both the 32 and 64 bit versions. I think they had RISCV support in their source tree at one point but not really at a commercial level. It does cover a lot different levels of hardware though

discuss

order

skissane|21 days ago

Does Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux?

Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI.

Apple does have one advantage here-they can legally grant themselves permission to run macOS internally on non-Apple hardware, and I don’t believe doing so legally obliges them to extend the same allowance to their customers.

But that might give them a reason to keep x86_64 alive for internal use, since that platform (still) gives you more options for server-class hardware than ARM does

jabwd|20 days ago

They do run Apple Silicon in data centers, so perhaps another custom version of Darwin + their system frameworks. It is hard to tell without some leaks :)

therein|20 days ago

They use Ubuntu on x86-64 servers, at least for iCloud. Backends for iCloud, Photos and Backups etc. are written in Java.

wiml|21 days ago

PPC32/64 of course, and for a long time Darwin still contained remnants of its predecessor's support for SPARC, PA-RISC, and m68k.

userbinator|21 days ago

Which Apple products run arm32 XNU? Their first Apple Silicon CPUs were already arm64.

dagmx|20 days ago

Well there were still the historical arm32 chips in their iOS devices, but until recently the watches were a cursed arm64_32 (or something like that) which is arm64 with 32 bit pointers iirc.

kjs3|21 days ago

Is mc68k or PPC still in there anywhere?

monocasa|21 days ago

I'm sure there's vestiges of them somewhere, but the underlying support (the architecture specific parts of the mach portion of the kernel) is gone for those archs.