Obs30 So this should be easy for them to offer native drivers for the M1. Probably just a matter of time.
The original Rosetta was released to bridge the gap at the time Apple switched from the Motorola/IBM processors (the Apple-IBM-Motorola, or AIM consortium) to the Intel processors. It first appeared in 2006, and Apple only finally stop supporting Rosetta in 2011.
Rosetta 2 was released to bridge the gap between Intel processors and Apple's M1 processor. If history repeats, it may last for another 5 years, so there is no big rush.
Rosetta 2 is quite efficient (surprised even myself) as is, without having to run native code. The Intel version of Astro Pixel Processor on a M1 Mac Mini ran about twice as fast as it did natively on a dual Xeon Mac Pro from 2009 (that Mac Pro has 8 processors, each running 2+ GHz). One of my antenna modeling programs (purely number crunching and Cocoa graphics) also ran twice as fast, causing me not to even recompile it.
That being said, there are many libraries out there that are not yet "universal" (i.e., with both Intel and ARM components). So, to release an application for the Mac (e.g., ASIStudio), ZWO would need to release two different versions of ASIStudio for the Mac. You may have to wait until all the libraries that are used by ASIStudio are Universal before they release a version that will run natively on both x86_64 and ARM64 Macs.
Case in point is the ffmpeg library (libavcodec, etc), which is needed if you wish to create AVI files that MacOS and iOS AVFoundation libraries do not support. There is an ffmpeg library build for x86_64, and there is an ffmpeg build for ARM64, but there is no Universal library (library with components for both x86_64 and ARM64) -- and that is likely because ffmpeg itself depends on dozens and dozens of other open sourced libraries, and those need to also be Universal before ffmpeg can be Universal, and in turn for applications that use ffmpeg to be universal.
I hit the above problem just last week when I tried to use the ffmpeg library on my M1 Macs (experimentation with Wiener whitening of the MTF of AVI files of Jupiter from a small OTA, that is created by ASIAIR). I eventually just compiled against the ARM64 architecture, since the program is for my own consumption only.
Although the M1 uses the ARM instruction set, it is not an ARM chip, but designed from the ground up at Apple. Recall that Apple was one of original owners of the Acorn architecture -- ARM stood for Acorn RISC Machine, so Apple is licensed for perpetuity with the ARM instruction set, no matter who ARM is eventually sold to.
Chen
