First, I don't think that fast vector operations are a driving force for much of the Mac market these days. A lot of people who are sensitive to these things are already migrating away because of other wedge issues. I do care, enough to demand Intel's MKL over BLAS, but the optimized vector code issue still doesn't worry me, because my local workloads are lightweight and anything where it really matters is already being pushed out to a server farm somewhere. I've actually been trying to convince my own employer to start letting developers have Linux workstations instead of Macs for a host of other reasons. Notably, I'm just getting tired of having to deal with all the little subtle differences in behavior between Docker's Linux distribution and its Mac distribution. And, as an extension of that, I'd be much more worried about not being able to use the same Docker images in production and development than I am about a minor little thing like how well the vector instructions are being used.
Second, Apple has plenty of resources to handle doing those optimizations themselves. They did it before, with AltiVec, and, while I realize that team was disbanded a very long time ago, I expect the existence of iOS as a gaming platform means that an equivalent team either already exists, or could be ramped up quickly. And I presume that covers the most important factors for what would be noticeable to desktop users, such as Quartz.
First, I don't think that fast vector operations are a driving force for much of the Mac market these days. A lot of people who are sensitive to these things are already migrating away because of other wedge issues. I do care, enough to demand Intel's MKL over BLAS, but the optimized vector code issue still doesn't worry me, because my local workloads are lightweight and anything where it really matters is already being pushed out to a server farm somewhere. I've actually been trying to convince my own employer to start letting developers have Linux workstations instead of Macs for a host of other reasons. Notably, I'm just getting tired of having to deal with all the little subtle differences in behavior between Docker's Linux distribution and its Mac distribution. And, as an extension of that, I'd be much more worried about not being able to use the same Docker images in production and development than I am about a minor little thing like how well the vector instructions are being used.
Second, Apple has plenty of resources to handle doing those optimizations themselves. They did it before, with AltiVec, and, while I realize that team was disbanded a very long time ago, I expect the existence of iOS as a gaming platform means that an equivalent team either already exists, or could be ramped up quickly. And I presume that covers the most important factors for what would be noticeable to desktop users, such as Quartz.