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I'm think those reviews are more or less fluff pieces. First, they intentionally gloss over the performance aspect; as a owner of multiple ARM boards, I can te

I'm think those reviews are more or less fluff pieces. First, they intentionally gloss over the performance aspect; as a owner of multiple ARM boards, I can tell you that the A53 performance is terrible for desktop usage; it's not even good for headless servers (although "terrible" is relative). Second, I'm very skeptical about the 64-bit claim, which they haven't investigated. While ARM CPUs are 64-bit themselves, ARM Linux distros are typically 32-bit. And finally, don't underestimate the lack of support for ARM builds. While of course, the full Ubuntu repositories are available, for software outside them, the "compiling from source" can be troublesome for ARM architectures. I think that a high-power ARM laptop (ie. A15 or more) would be interesting; but not a low-power one.

ulzeraj 9y ago
I’m curious about Aarch64. Is it like x86 where you can just install a generic Aarch64 kernel and operating system and just make it works or do I have to build a very specific system for that board like images that are specifically aimed at the pi? To be clear I’m really interested on the Rock64 boards but I don’t like any of their OS options. It would be great to be able to use the Aarch64 port of Alpine Linux on those.
- pizza234 9y ago
  In general, SBC SOCs require customizations due to (at least) bootloader and blobs. On top of those, there are typically other patches to expose various functionalities (eg. cooling). There's surprising little information about 64-bit SBC O/S. It's possible that 64 bits don't give so much performance improvement, or that they increase the power consumption - not sure. It seems that nobody really took the time (and distro...) to do an accurate comparison. Having said that, curiously, SUSE actually produced a 64-bit distro (https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberry-pi https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberr...), due to them already having an ARM distribution. I'll actually try it at some point - I'm very curious. More direct download link: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/ https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ulzeraj 9y ago

I’m curious about Aarch64. Is it like x86 where you can just install a generic Aarch64 kernel and operating system and just make it works or do I have to build a very specific system for that board like images that are specifically aimed at the pi? To be clear I’m really interested on the Rock64 boards but I don’t like any of their OS options. It would be great to be able to use the Aarch64 port of Alpine Linux on those.

pizza234 9y ago
In general, SBC SOCs require customizations due to (at least) bootloader and blobs. On top of those, there are typically other patches to expose various functionalities (eg. cooling). There's surprising little information about 64-bit SBC O/S. It's possible that 64 bits don't give so much performance improvement, or that they increase the power consumption - not sure. It seems that nobody really took the time (and distro...) to do an accurate comparison. Having said that, curiously, SUSE actually produced a 64-bit distro (https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberry-pi https://www.suse.com/c/suse-linux-enterprise-server-raspberr...), due to them already having an ARM distribution. I'll actually try it at some point - I'm very curious. More direct download link: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/ https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/arm/raspberry-pi/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]