What is different about apples chips that prevents you from booting normal arm operating systems
In: Technology
ARM is an instruction set, and the ARM company puts out chip designs based on it. Companies then buy licenses. Most companies buy licenses to simply make chips that include the ARM core designs. But small number of companies have a higher-level architectural license, which means the company can design their own cores using the ARM instruction set. These licenses are obscenely expensive.
Apple has one of these licenses. So while their instruction set is ARM, their chips are their own in-house design, quite a bit different from other ARM chips out there. Their new M1 laptop/desktop processor is also ARM, and of course it’s their own design because there’s nothing else like it out there.
One thing Apple does with this ability is to tie the chip very closely to the operating system. A good example is the Secure Enclave, the security portion of the chip that holds the encryption keys and other important things. It has signing with the OS to ensure the chain of trust from software to hardware remains intact. You don’t have the right key, you don’t get to run stuff.
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