I'm surprised and humbled that a project of this importance doesn't have their own physical ARM machine for benchmarking. Compare that to the computer and human time saved across all the places it could be used!
This work was sponsored by ARM itself, though, so it is a bit surprising they didn't supply suitable hardware from one of their licensees (they must have some to do benchmarks themselves).
SolidRun has a MiniITX board supporting up to 2x32GB for around $1000 [0]. They also have a preproduction units for another board for $550 supporting as much RAM [1].
They probably had their reasons, but I'm just showing what's available.
Well cross-compiling (aka "cross translation) is made complicated because PyPy doesn't use a normal toolchain, but that's not the problem here. The PyPy benchmark suite itself takes that much memory to run.
Don't want to be rude (nor rehash old topics) but is pypy used that much to be considered important? People with performance goals go to C, whether its a library or some Cython.
Don't get me wrong, i love pypy and the rpython jit.
Apple tends to dive head-first into these things and lets the community catch-up after the release in their own time. So it could come a day when MacBooks are suddenly only available with ARM architectures (with dynamic binary translation or something to support the transition, I'm sure, but if you're going for performance you wouldn't want that abstraction) so it's up to us to prepare if we don't want to be left out.
Apple isn't going to suddenly only offer ARM Macs and take everyone's Intel Macs away. Look at their past transitions. They transition quickly and firmly, but not that quickly and firmly. Last time it took them about a year (iirc) from the announcement to them even only releasing Intel Macs.
They offered a translation layer (which was slower, but enabled all old software to run) and it then took many years for them to stop supporting PowerPC Macs.
Right, but the difference is the last time all the major runtimes already supported Intel, due to it being the predominate architecture, so the software was ready and there was no performance cliff. You may need to hang on to your old Intel MacBook for a while if the software you have performance requirements for isn't available for ARM yet.
And the Intel performance boost on the first released devices was substantial, as the laptops were still running G4s. So anything that relied on the translation layer was usable.
If the ARM chips don't meet Intel peak performance, and I suspect they won't, you're in for a bad time going through similar system.
