[Development] [Interest] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant for More than 95% of Mac Desktops

[Thiago Macieira]

On Saturday, 17 December 2022 05:40:48 -03 Tuukka Turunen via Interest wrote:
> at least between versions 10.15 and 11 there does not seem to be a
> major drop in what HW is supported.

There is a drop, but we're talking about  CPUs launched in 2013 and older. 
Specifically, 11.0 drops support for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Macbooks and 
Mac Minis. Whether you count that as "major" or not, I'll leave it up to you.

What matters to me is that those were the last AVX-incapable CPUs, which allow 
us to assume that AVX2 is present.

> There is also positive development happening. With the latest versions the
> virtualization support is improving so that we are hopeful to be able to
> use the hardware more efficiently (by running two virtual machines in each
> physical HW). So while macOS is still far from the convenience we have with
> Linux and Windows that support sever grade hardware, things are getting
> better with Macs as well going forward (not for 10.15, though).

I wonder how Apple tests their stuff. All the CIs that run macOS that I know of 
as well as cloud providers (AWS in particular) simply have several thousand 
Mac Minis.

However, you *can* buy server grade Mac systems. They are called Mac Pro and 
they come with up to 28-core Intel Xeon CPUs. They even come in rack form. 
But, of course, they cost an arm and a leg (Apple mark-up). The base model 
with 8 cores costs as much as a Dell Powerline rack workstation with a 20+ 
cores of the same Xeon generation. The top of the line model with 28 cores is 
roughly the same price as an workstation or full server with two 28-core Xeon 
Gold, or servers with two 32-core Xeons of the generation after that with a 
slightly lower base clock.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering