On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 at 20:12, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote: > My Dell Precision M3800 running Fedora works great but is really starting > to > show its age, and I'm thinking about getting a new Mac M1-based laptop as > it > would really be useful for Video production. > > But I really need to have a IA64 CentOS 7/8 VMs running locally for > development as I'm often on the road and flaky Internet makes it a > necessity to > keep productivity up. I've been unable to officially confirm that VMWare/ > Parallels/VirtualBox intend to support IA64 based OS's and it *needs* to > be an > exact (VM) copy of production so I can trial environments and builds prior > to > roll out. > > 1. The Apple M1 uses a variant of the aarch64 (ARM 64 bit) CPU, and the hardware architecture is different from aarch64 server class hardware in multiple ways. 2. Currently the work to get Linux to run on the M1 works great in emulation and somewhat with a lot of work in native mode. 3. IA64 is the Itanium server which Intel stopped making a while ago and Red Hat quit supporting in 2017. 4. x86_64 (or amd64 ) is the native processor name for the Intel/AMD 64 bit architecture. It is what your older system runs. 5. The only way to run x86_64 on an M1 is via 'double' emulation. First you would have to run a virtual machine on the M1 and that virtual machine would have to emulate the x86_64. It would be extremely slow, inefficient and probably could not emulate all the hardware needed. If you are needing to update your hardware, you need to keep Linux running native on the system, and that system needs to be x86_64, you will either need to get an earlier generation Mac or a current system from Dell, HP, ASUS, etc. -- Stephen J Smoogen.