6 ms·

If you want a non-x86 desktop, but not AArch64 in particular, I'd recommend looking at the Talos POWER9 systems instead. I have a Talos II Lite, and my only two

If you want a non-x86 desktop, but not AArch64 in particular, I'd recommend looking at the Talos POWER9 systems instead. I have a Talos II Lite, and my only two complaints (less pcie slots with only a single socket, and no built in sata) were solved with their new Blackbird motherboard. It's gotten closer to the desktop experience than any AArch64 computer I've tried, and in some ways it's even better (petitboot is awesome).

Koshkin 7y ago
But in all fairness, why would anyone just "want a non-x86 desktop" (as in: "anything but x86"). Doesn't make sense to me...
- hootbootscoot 7y ago
  maybe you detest x86 and love aarch64. it's like cars. i dunno...why do you need to understand it for it to be a "thing" that exists in the world outside of your head?
  - hootbootscoot 7y ago
    it's the 64bit leap from the acorn risc machine, for crying out loud, it's its own goal, wantable for it's own sake. pity that riscos will never be 64bit lol
    - qubex 7y ago
      Precisely: I want to do it because it’ll be interesting, the same reason I had a BeBox in the mid nineties and a Plan9 network in the 2000s.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  It can be useful to test code that's supposed to be portable on a system with a weaker than x86 memory model. And a self-synchronizing instruction stream can be a security advantage and a fixed instruction width means Power and AArch64 are trivially self-synchronizing. And really just not having the dominant ISA is a pretty big security advantage in some cases. I'm pretty sure that neither of those is a huge deal for most people but I can see wanting it.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    ELI5: How, specifically, does AArch64 have a "weaker than x86" memory model?
    - ken 7y ago
      Googling those terms will turn up lots of hits, e.g., https://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ https://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/
    - asveikau 7y ago
      When multiple cores access the same memory location, it is expensive for one core to invalidate the cache of another or ensure operations don't get re-ordered in either core. These days most architectures when reading or writing shared data require memory barrier instructions to guarantee your core to sees writes from another, or other cores to see your writes, in a timely sequential fashion like we expect when writing code that accesses variables. Historically there were architectures that would reorder these accesses in a "lax" way, making very few guarantees about what you will see from another core, on the theory that it will cost less to keep things synchronized between cores (most data is not shared anyway, so why waste work trying to create a unified view across cores? The CPU can also reorder work for better efficiency.). Intel is historically one of the most conservative, strict-ordering architectures, requiring fewer barrier instructions and creating the illusion that reads and writes more or less occur on a single timeline. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > And a self-synchronizing instruction stream can be a security advantage and a fixed instruction width means Power and AArch64 are trivially self-synchronizing. AArch64 is aligned, but not self-synchronizing. While it would not be possible to execute, reading code at an arbitrary offset can still create be valid code. I'd imagine Power has the same issue, since it's really hard to do this generally if you'd like to have a sane encoding and support immediate. Somewhat interestingly, x86 is variable length but I have heard that it is often "eventually self-synchronizing": apparently if you start it off at the wrong offset, it will decode a couple of instructions incorrectly but usually end up disassembling to the correct ones.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  x86 may be locally optimal, but I don't trust it not to be a dead end, or at least, have its lunch eaten by something else; I personally am interested in non-standard configurations just to make sure that we can try new things.
- salawat 7y ago
  Maybe people just want to play heavily modded Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi that they can quickly set up and shotgun to eager nephews all across the country. Just throwing that out there.
- AlEinstein 7y ago
  I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. It’s a fair question to ask. “Why can’t I buy” is essentially equivalent to “why doesn’t anyone sell”, which is basically “why isn’t there a market for?” It’s possible to have a conversation around “why isn’t there a market for ARM desktops?” or equivalent but a conversation about “why isn’t there a market for anything but x86” would basically be enumerating the alternatives and examining each. Nobody is going to open a store aimed at the “anyone but x86” market.
  - ken 7y ago
    It's not that crazy. In other fields, there are stores for "alternative ___". There's a record store a couple blocks from me which sells every physical medium except CD. There's a car dealer which sells cars for every fuel except gasoline. There's many restaurants which serve foods with every ingredient except meat. There's government departments, education departments, and stores which deal in every language except English. When one way is dominant, it's not uncommon for all the others to get rolled up into an "alternative" grouping. Any one of them by itself would be too small to amount to even a small store, but all of them together are a decent set.
  - qubex 7y ago
    “Why can’t I buy?” ≠ •Why doesn’t anyone sell?” ≠ “Why isn’t there a market for?”, not even close. Why can’t I buy talent (in the sense of myself being talented at something)? Because nobody sells it? There’s no market for it? Nah. I’m an economist but the notion of everything being tradable on a market needs to be curtailed because it simply isn’t true.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  You want better performance per watt. Apple sells millions of iPads and Google OEMs sell some number of ARM Chromebooks and Tablets. Amazon is selling little android tablets as low as $40. The desktop is essentially a legacy model as it stands today. Nobody is offering ARM because Windows doesn’t support it, and there really aren’t other options. Even enterprises are shipping the cheapest crap possible for PCs and innovating on mobile. You’ll see some change when Apple ships ultralight laptops that aren’t as compromised as the intel platform devices.
- haerwu 7y ago
  If your work is all non-x86 then having powerful non-x86 box handy helps a lot.
loeg 7y ago
Yes, Power is the closest to a real x86 desktop competitor but you have to pay something like 4x the cost.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Also, those things suffer from the same issues as those pointed out in the OP: a server motherboard crammed into a desktop case; the built-in VGA graphics comes from the integrated "server management engine", limited hardware support/driver availability, etc. Lots of fun to be had for lots of money!
  - gigatexal 7y ago
    And the benchmarks I saw show you paying much much more for it than for x86 but get far less perf in return.
    - loeg 7y ago
      Yeah. My earlier comment should have read "4x the cost for the same performance."
    - nine_k 7y ago
      You pay also for the fact that everything is open, down to the microcode loader. No closed management engine, no firmware blobs.
- TD-Linux 7y ago
  The cost is pretty comparable to the Ampere eMAG AArch64 system in the OP, which costs about $3k. It's an unfortunate fact of low volume production, though.
- ksec 7y ago
  >but you have to pay something like 4x the cost. Last time I check their pricing was actually quite competitive to x86 system.
  - 7y ago

Koshkin 7y ago

But in all fairness, why would anyone just "want a non-x86 desktop" (as in: "anything but x86"). Doesn't make sense to me...

hootbootscoot 7y ago
maybe you detest x86 and love aarch64. it's like cars. i dunno...why do you need to understand it for it to be a "thing" that exists in the world outside of your head?
- hootbootscoot 7y ago
  it's the 64bit leap from the acorn risc machine, for crying out loud, it's its own goal, wantable for it's own sake. pity that riscos will never be 64bit lol
  - qubex 7y ago
    Precisely: I want to do it because it’ll be interesting, the same reason I had a BeBox in the mid nineties and a Plan9 network in the 2000s.
Symmetry 7y ago
It can be useful to test code that's supposed to be portable on a system with a weaker than x86 memory model. And a self-synchronizing instruction stream can be a security advantage and a fixed instruction width means Power and AArch64 are trivially self-synchronizing. And really just not having the dominant ISA is a pretty big security advantage in some cases. I'm pretty sure that neither of those is a huge deal for most people but I can see wanting it.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  ELI5: How, specifically, does AArch64 have a "weaker than x86" memory model?
  - ken 7y ago
    Googling those terms will turn up lots of hits, e.g., https://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/ https://preshing.com/20120930/weak-vs-strong-memory-models/
  - asveikau 7y ago
    When multiple cores access the same memory location, it is expensive for one core to invalidate the cache of another or ensure operations don't get re-ordered in either core. These days most architectures when reading or writing shared data require memory barrier instructions to guarantee your core to sees writes from another, or other cores to see your writes, in a timely sequential fashion like we expect when writing code that accesses variables. Historically there were architectures that would reorder these accesses in a "lax" way, making very few guarantees about what you will see from another core, on the theory that it will cost less to keep things synchronized between cores (most data is not shared anyway, so why waste work trying to create a unified view across cores? The CPU can also reorder work for better efficiency.). Intel is historically one of the most conservative, strict-ordering architectures, requiring fewer barrier instructions and creating the illusion that reads and writes more or less occur on a single timeline. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ordering
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > And a self-synchronizing instruction stream can be a security advantage and a fixed instruction width means Power and AArch64 are trivially self-synchronizing. AArch64 is aligned, but not self-synchronizing. While it would not be possible to execute, reading code at an arbitrary offset can still create be valid code. I'd imagine Power has the same issue, since it's really hard to do this generally if you'd like to have a sane encoding and support immediate. Somewhat interestingly, x86 is variable length but I have heard that it is often "eventually self-synchronizing": apparently if you start it off at the wrong offset, it will decode a couple of instructions incorrectly but usually end up disassembling to the correct ones.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
x86 may be locally optimal, but I don't trust it not to be a dead end, or at least, have its lunch eaten by something else; I personally am interested in non-standard configurations just to make sure that we can try new things.
salawat 7y ago
Maybe people just want to play heavily modded Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi that they can quickly set up and shotgun to eager nephews all across the country. Just throwing that out there.
AlEinstein 7y ago
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. It’s a fair question to ask. “Why can’t I buy” is essentially equivalent to “why doesn’t anyone sell”, which is basically “why isn’t there a market for?” It’s possible to have a conversation around “why isn’t there a market for ARM desktops?” or equivalent but a conversation about “why isn’t there a market for anything but x86” would basically be enumerating the alternatives and examining each. Nobody is going to open a store aimed at the “anyone but x86” market.
- ken 7y ago
  It's not that crazy. In other fields, there are stores for "alternative ___". There's a record store a couple blocks from me which sells every physical medium except CD. There's a car dealer which sells cars for every fuel except gasoline. There's many restaurants which serve foods with every ingredient except meat. There's government departments, education departments, and stores which deal in every language except English. When one way is dominant, it's not uncommon for all the others to get rolled up into an "alternative" grouping. Any one of them by itself would be too small to amount to even a small store, but all of them together are a decent set.
- qubex 7y ago
  “Why can’t I buy?” ≠ •Why doesn’t anyone sell?” ≠ “Why isn’t there a market for?”, not even close. Why can’t I buy talent (in the sense of myself being talented at something)? Because nobody sells it? There’s no market for it? Nah. I’m an economist but the notion of everything being tradable on a market needs to be curtailed because it simply isn’t true.
Spooky23 7y ago
You want better performance per watt. Apple sells millions of iPads and Google OEMs sell some number of ARM Chromebooks and Tablets. Amazon is selling little android tablets as low as $40. The desktop is essentially a legacy model as it stands today. Nobody is offering ARM because Windows doesn’t support it, and there really aren’t other options. Even enterprises are shipping the cheapest crap possible for PCs and innovating on mobile. You’ll see some change when Apple ships ultralight laptops that aren’t as compromised as the intel platform devices.
haerwu 7y ago
If your work is all non-x86 then having powerful non-x86 box handy helps a lot.

loeg 7y ago

Yes, Power is the closest to a real x86 desktop competitor but you have to pay something like 4x the cost.

Koshkin 7y ago
Also, those things suffer from the same issues as those pointed out in the OP: a server motherboard crammed into a desktop case; the built-in VGA graphics comes from the integrated "server management engine", limited hardware support/driver availability, etc. Lots of fun to be had for lots of money!
- gigatexal 7y ago
  And the benchmarks I saw show you paying much much more for it than for x86 but get far less perf in return.
  - loeg 7y ago
    Yeah. My earlier comment should have read "4x the cost for the same performance."
  - nine_k 7y ago
    You pay also for the fact that everything is open, down to the microcode loader. No closed management engine, no firmware blobs.
TD-Linux 7y ago
The cost is pretty comparable to the Ampere eMAG AArch64 system in the OP, which costs about $3k. It's an unfortunate fact of low volume production, though.
ksec 7y ago
>but you have to pay something like 4x the cost. Last time I check their pricing was actually quite competitive to x86 system.
- 7y ago