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

[Tuukka Turunen]

Dropping the interest list to discuss a bit the macOS virtualization.

> ....you *can* buy server grade Mac systems. They are called Mac Pro and...

Apple's standard license agreement allowes to virtualize two macOS instances on macOS. For this level Mac Mini is quite sufficient, better if the next model comes with more RAM.

So even if we would take the cost of Mac Pro -level hardware, we would not be able to run more than two VMs per each machine.

Anyways, for the moment we don't yet have even that in use, just looking into leveraging the new virtualization framework Apple provides. There is also the issue of supporting both Intel and ARM processors during the transition period, which about doubles the HW need.

Yours,

Tuukka

________________________________
Lähettäjä: Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
Lähetetty: sunnuntaina, joulukuuta 18, 2022 3:29 ap.
Vastaanottaja: development at qt-project.org <development at qt-project.org>; interest at qt-project.org <interest at qt-project.org>
Kopio: Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io>
Aihe: Re: [Interest] [Development] Qt 6.5 Is Irrelevant for More than 95% of Mac Desktops

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



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