RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
Comment on There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent
xantoxis@lemmy.world 1 month agoARM looking pretty good too these days
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it.
RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com 1 month ago
I’ll take that as well please.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
It’s not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won’t be too much longer.
whostosay@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.
For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.
Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.
SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Not really
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
icydefiance@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
tal@lemmy.today 1 month ago
I rrally think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But this is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
batshit@lemmings.world 1 month ago
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would a ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and server-grade ARM boards.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
arm is a mixes bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite os disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.
digdilem@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
They’re already doing it. We replaced our 6 vmware hosts earlier this year. Initially priced for Intel but then got offered AMD. Less cost, twice the power. Got 5 of them and saved some money.
Some code that relied upon intel hardware did need rebuilding, but otherwise it’s been very good.