I’ve been thinking of this quite a lot, and I beg everybody’s pardon if I now proceed to veer off topic, but...

I’ve been thinking about the landmark announcement by Apple that surprised absolutely nobody by informing its developers and the wider world that it will be switching to “Apple Silicon”, a yet-to-be-filled placeholder for a brandname-to-be. (The only thing it almost guarantees is that officially they won’t be any reference to ‘ARM’.)

So, famously Gil Amelio quipped that he had chosen to buy NeXT “rather than Plan Be” when, panicked by declining sales and hampered by an obsolete OS, he plonked down a sizeable amount of an on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy Apple to buy a working OS to succeed their decidedly musty old eighties tech; something they hadn’t been able to develop internally. NeXTStep had excellent developer tools, a close tie to graphic design (by way of its Display PostScript), and rather Frankenstein-ish UNIX core, though I’d hesitate to call it a “beating heart”. The core OS, the kernel, and so forth, were not the main strong point and were not great performers. It’s what stood above that had value and that has, apparently, driven and undergirded much of what Apple did since then and until now.

And yet, just as they finally abandon the charade of macOS X being “Mac Os Ten” and move forward to “macOS 11”, I can’t help but think that the path they have traced themselves will lead them to need to reimplement much of their core technology in a manner that is more akin to how BeOS’s “pervasive multithreading" was conceived almost thirty years ago. What do our devices provide us with now? Real-time media streams and lag-free interactivity whilst connected to a network and running on a fairly modest platform. When I first heard Be’s motto “One Processor Per Person Is Not Enough!” I was bewitched (to the point that my teenage-self me insisted obstinately that his next PC be a dual-processor, to experience the exotic thrill of it). But now it’s normal.

Apple’s switching to its own silicon, which probably means larger grids of the cores it already has shown are so incredibly overpowered for the likes of the iPad Pro (so much so that what every iPad Pro over has secretly suspected—that their machine could comfortably run macOS and a bunch of demanding applications—has been confirmed). I heard somewhere that the A12Z that powers the current-generation iPad Pros (and now coincidentally is pulling very honourable double duty as the SoC in the Developer Transition Kit) is a 4W part, and that the current MacBook Air is apparently designed for a 16W thermal capacity, therefore we can expect something along the lines of “four times as many of whatever will go in the A14”, and that’s a fair first-order approximation. So like with the AMD case, we’re going to have a lot of cores.

They’re going to need the BeOS ethos to master all those cores. And it’ll be interesting to watch, because our collective success with GPUs and some embarrassingly-parallelisable non-graphics corollaries have given us a collective false sense of security of having somehow ‘mastered’ parallelism. Ultimately at root our systems are built on mechanisms and assumptions that only scale favourably so far. Maybe it’s time to go back and have a good look at what those folks did in the early nineties when they delivered realtime multimedia streams on interactive devices with an absolute minimum of lag and did it all with what now we’d consider a pittance of resources.