Comment on Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme crushes Apple M4, Intel, and AMD in new benchmarks
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 weeks agoAsahi linux is perhaps only distro that is trying to support “desktop arm”. Not just gpu, but it does not post for M3/M4 arm chips. Qualcom does not have an OS protection racket, and so could be more helpful to the project, but phone support (limited/tailored to each chip generation it seems) doesn’t seem to mean all future arm automagically supported.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There are quite a few more. For example Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, Alpine and Kali also have ARM ports (and probably many others too). Raspberry OS is purpose-built for ARM Desktop. There’s others too.
Asahi isn’t specifically an ARM Linux, but an Apple Silicon Linux.
Apple Silicon is ARM, but it’s also its own semi-custom thing that’s not directly compatible with other ARM stuff.
That’s the main issue with supporting ARM: You don’t have one platform like x86/x64.
On x86/x64 there’s an abstraction between the machine code language and the microcode that’s actually executed in the CPU. There’s a microcode translation layer in the CPU that translates one to the other, so x86/x64 chip designers have a lot of freedom when designing their actual CPU. The downside being that the translation layer consumes a little bit of performance.
There’s also the UEFI system and a ton of other things that keep the platform stable and standardized, so that you can run essentially the same software on a 15yo Intel CPU and a modern AMD.
ARM is much more diverse. Some run Devicetree, some don’t. There are also multiple different ARM architectures, and since they are customizable, there’s just so much variety.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
thank you for correction. Do any linux distributions support qualcomm’s first (last gen) “elite win/chorme books?”
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t have personal experience with that, but according to google (www.linaro.org/blog/linux-on-snapdragon-x-elite) it is at least a thing.
Wouldn’t expect it to be great though.