Nintendo Switch Games on Apple Silicon Are the Coolest Thing of 2020

Apple launched Apple Silicon with much fanfare last month, and as we said on several occasions, developers are now working around the clock to optimize their apps and make them fully compatible with the new chip.

In the meantime, however, others are working on testing the capabilities of the M1-powered devices, just to figure out how far the ARM-based chip can go.

And a project shared on Twitter by @daeken shows something you wouldn’t normally expect on an Apple device: Super Mario Odyssey, a game developed for the Nintendo Switch, running on an M1-powered MacBook Pro.

That’s right, Nintendo Switch games are now running on Apple’s MacBook, and it’s all thanks to the ARM architecture. Both the Switch and the MacBook use ARM chips, though as the developer explains, making this happen is not as straightforward as it seems.

The Apple Silicon effects

Apple praised the capabilities of the M1 chip at its press event in November, explaining the processor has been specifically built for performance and battery life.

“It features the world’s fastest CPU core in low-power silicon, the world’s best CPU performance per watt, the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer, and breakthrough machine learning performance with the Apple Neural Engine. As a result, M1 delivers up to 3.5x faster CPU performance, up to 6x faster GPU performance, and up to 15x faster machine learning, all while enabling battery life up to 2x longer than previous-generation Macs. With its profound increase in performance and efficiency, M1 delivers the biggest leap ever for the Mac,” Apple said.

Apple investing in a custom ARM chip has caught the attention of other companies, including Microsoft, as several others are now said to be working on similar projects. For now, however, Apple is the company getting all the praises for its ARM efforts, so it remains to be seen how this side of the market would evolve in the long term.