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Exciting Days for ARM Processors
- saagarjha 6y ago> One possible downside of the new Macs, is that Apple keeps talking about the new secure boot feature only allowing Apple signed operating systems to boot as a security feature. Does this mean we won’t be able to run Linux on these new Macs, except using virtualization? No, you can turn off secure boot.
- iknowstuff 6y agoNot on ARM macs. The option is missing. The only remaining option is for allowing older versions of the OS, which must still be signed by Apple.
- selsta 6y agoThe GUI does not display all options. You most likely can use csrutil to disable it, see the “Platforms State of the Union” WWDC talk.
- saagarjha 6y agoI think I remember a WWDC talk mentioning that it would be possible via a revamped csrutil from recovery. Edit: this one, about 19 minutes in: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/
- Yetanfou 6y agoYou can on Intel-based machines, as far as I know it is not clear yet whether you can on ARM-based systems.
- somerandomqaguy 6y agoPressure for that came from Microsoft for Windows 8 certified devices: "Enable/Disable Secure Boot. On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of PKpriv. A Windows Server may also disable Secure Boot remotely using a strongly authenticated (preferably public-key based) out-of-band management connection, such as to a baseboard management controller or service processor. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling Secure Boot must not be possible on ARM systems."[1] This requirement is no longer needed for Windows 10 logo certified x86_64 computer,[2] but I've yet to see a vendor actually take it out. For SOC systems, at least if you wish to have Windows 10 Logo, it makes it optional if I'm reading their spec sheet correctly: "Requirement 10: OPTIONAL. An OEM may implement the ability for a physically present user to turn off Secure Boot either with access to the PKpriv or with Physical Presence through the firmware setup. Access to the firmware setup may be protected by platform specific means (administrator password, smart card, static configuration, etc.)"[3] That said, that's only for Windows logo certified devices. I'd assume if you don't intend to make you system Windows compatible then you can do whatever you want. ------ [1]https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/hardware/cert-program/windows-hardware-certification-requirements-for-client-and-server-systems https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/h... [2]https://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-windows-10s-secure-boot-screws-where-does-that-leave-linux.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2901262/microsoft-tightens-w... [3]https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/uefi-requirements-that-apply-to-all-windows-platforms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br...
- kick 6y agoWas it just a gaffe when Federighi mentioned you couldn't install alternative operating systems in his recent Daring Fireball interview, then? I admit I could have misunderstood him, but it seemed like that was what he was saying.
- neilalexander 6y agoDid he say you couldn’t install them or that they wouldn’t be “supported”? Those are two different things.
- saagarjha 6y agoHaven’t gotten to that part yet! Maybe I will on my next walk. But I would guess that he was talking about Linux virtualization being good enough that you wouldn’t need to do this and/or no Bootcamp support?
- saagarjha 6y agoFollow up: I got to that point, I think the words were “we’re not direct booting an alternate operating system” in reference to not running Windows in Bootcamp on x86 and to reaffirm that Bootcamp was not a thing, not that there would be no support for booting other things.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- treebornfrog 6y agoRead the first paragraph then wished that the font on mobile was a lot bigger.
- dang 6y ago"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- saagarjha 6y agoIs this a new addition to the guidelines? I could have sworn it wasn’t there before…
- grzm 6y agoYup! Just 10 days new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652373
- treebornfrog 6y agoThanks. I didn't see that this was updated 10 days ago. Now my comment has been down voted into oblivion.
- dang 6y agoOk, I've brought your comment back from oblivion. One-time offer.
- rwmj 6y agoSurprised he doesn't mention Nuvia, which could be a very exciting development in Arm servers (if it lives up to the hype of course).
- jabl 6y agoIsn't Nuvia "just" making a server chip with ARM Neoverse cores? Nothing to sneeze at, sure, but if you want to kick the tires just launch a graviton2 instance on AWS?
- floatboth 6y agoAWS won't sell you the physical hardware. Ampere will, though — Altra's going to be good. Also there's Marvell (ex-Cavium), but that's custom cores, and rather HPC-focused. More choice is more better though, and since Jon Masters works for Nuvia, we know Nuvia is going to have the most compliant and least quirky hardware, especially in the PCIe area :) Though to be fair, Ampere's first generation is already very decent in terms of this, and Ampere even promised to eventually contribute support for their hardware to EDK2 TianoCore open firmware..
- skavi 6y agoThey seem to see Neoverse as more of a competitor than a component. https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1237879913245368321?s=20 https://twitter.com/jonmasters/status/1237879913245368321?s=... Jon Masters works at Nuvia.
- gorgoiler 6y agoI take delivery of a Raspberry Pi 4 tomorrow. I’m really hoping it will replace my MBP for almost everything I do — namely clerical office work, teaching high school CS, and web browsing. Exciting times.
- SillaDeRuedas 6y agoAmazing! Isn't this the greatest idea ever?
- grugagag 6y agoHonest question. How is that any better than a small laptop? Is the price point that makes the difference?
- gorgoiler 6y agoThe price, and I’m also interested in portability and robustness. My plan is to hot desk with this thing between three locations: my office in school, my classroom, and my home office. I also want something weird. Kids kind of look down on PCs and especially Linux. It’s seen as kind of crappy compared to the shiny of iPhones and Windows gaming rigs. I hope to show them that there’s a third kind of computer with which one can do a lot, that also happens to be pocketable and under $100. (And also: ANSI keyboard Pinebook Pro has been sold out for weeks.)
- wayneftw 6y agoYou could do the same thing with a $100/150 NUC and get better performance and software compatibility - https://www.amazon.com/Wintel-Pro-Mini-ordenador-T8/dp/B083V1BKZM https://www.amazon.com/Wintel-Pro-Mini-ordenador-T8/dp/B083V...
- postalrat 6y agoI wish Intel or some other company would make a usb-c pc stick. So that I can plug it into a usb-c hub, do work, then later move to another usb-c hub and continue.
- butz 6y agoAre Apple ARM chips the same as other ARM chips or are there any "magic" that requires more work for developer to port software?
- baddox 6y agoApple licenses the ARM CPU architecture from Arm Holdings. My understanding is that Arm Holdings doesn't sell any hardware themselves.
- floatboth 6y agoArm sells both ISA licenses (which is what Apple has) that allow you to make a fully custom microarchitecture, and pre-made cores (which is what e.g. AWS has, along with all the little embedded SoC manufacturers). But yeah, they don't really sell physical hardware.
- jarfil 6y agoThey will likely have some Apple specific features, but I doubt they'd want to make them incompatible to the point of requiring a software rewrite compared to other ARM chips. Just recompile your stuff, jump through whatever hoops you need to publish it, and that should be it.
- saagarjha 6y agoGoing by their iPhone chips: nothing special to worry about, other than page sizes which may not be an issue in the future depending on how Rosetta 2 works on their actual shipping hardware. There are some proprietary MSRs but they’re not for your use ;)
- squarefoot 6y agoPure speculation on my part, but I think Apple wouldn't want people installing either other OSes on their machines or their OS on other hardware, so I would expect some lock-in hardware/firmware/software to make impossible or really difficult to build ARM hackintoshes and the other way around. Hoping to be wrong, though.
- Rolcol 6y agoWhat size is a memory page on other ARM CPUs? I think Apple's processors use 16KiB pages. Doesn't x86 software assume a 4KiB page size, unless it deals with huge pages?
- opencl 6y agoThey all support 4KiB, 16KiB, and 1MiB. It's required by the ARM spec, obviously with the exception of CPUs that don't have an MMU. Support for 16MiB pages is optional.
- cesarb 6y agoAnd for 64-bit ARM, the base page sizes are 4KiB, 16KiB, and 64KiB, with IIRC 16KiB being optional. If you want 52-bit physical addresses, you need to use 64KiB base page size, otherwise the maximum is 48-bit physical addresses; this is probably why RHEL uses 64KiB page size on 64-bit ARM.
- monocasa 6y ago64kb is also a better match for today's working sets to avoid TLB pressure. I imagine x86 would switch to it or something close if it weren't such a schlep.
- cesarb 6y agoAnother advantage of a 64KiB page size is that it allows for a bigger L1. The L1 is usually VIPT (for good reasons), and to prevent confusing issues with aliases, it means that its maximum size is a single page per cache way. For an 8-way cache, that means the L1 can be at most 32KiB with a 4KiB page size; with a 64KiB page size, even a 2-way L1 cache could have up to 128KiB.
- Vogtinator 6y agoopenSUSE started with 64KiB as well, but that was found to have massive memory overhead with smaller files, so it was switched back to 4KiB.
- camillomiller 6y ago> I think Apple should be thanking the Raspberry Pi world for showing what you can do with SoCs, and for driving so much software to already be ported to the ARM processor. With all due respect, I love my raspberry pi, but Apple just needs to thank whoever was in charge of acquiring PA Semi’s know how in 2008, along with the chip mastermind that is Johni Srouji. Or themselves from 1990, when they actually founded ARM as a joint venture with Acorn computers to make chips for the Newton.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoBefore the Pi ... The first ARM-based device for Linux that I remember getting big was the Sheevaplug. It was an ARM-based "plug computer" with an SD card slot, a USB port IIRC, serial/JTAG port, Ethernet, Wifi, and no display. I had its next generation, the Guruplug, which had 2 Ethernet ports, Bluetooth, and a couple USB ports. Used it as a router for a few years. I don't know how long Debian's arm distro was around before then but that was my goto for the Guruplug. Worked great.
- jay-anderson 6y agoI still have my sheevaplug. It was great to have a small self-contained computer at the time. The raspberry pi definitely fills that spot today, but it isn't a full self-contained package like the sheevaplug was (for the pi you need to figure out the case and power).
- holri 6y agoThere is Olimex homer server: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/open-s... Fully contained package for a small home server, Free Hardware Design, SATA
- GloriousKoji 6y agoAlthough not an ARM device, the old Linksys Wrt54G (2002) was the first device to really get hackers interested and building a community around embedded Linux computing. There were other things but it was really the only one that was affordable and network connected. Later on the Linksys NSLU2 (2004, a network USB hard drive adapter) came out and was the first ARM based "computer" to really catch on. The custom firmware and optware offered a pretty good posix experience. It wasn't until 2008 when debian support came out, give the world a fully modern Linux experience on a little embedded device. After that companies started seeing a niche market and programmers accepted the challenge of installing linux on everything and we got things like the Sheeva Plug and BeagleBoard. A few years later the Raspberry Pi came out with an unbeatable price and community support. And then a decade later we're getting hints of the possibility of ARM computers with true workstation level of computing power.
- ttul 6y agoWhere can a developer buy one of these $500 ARM minis?
- thenewwazoo 6y agohttps://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/ https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/
- neallindsay 6y agoYou can’t buy them - it’s more of a rental situation.
- saagarjha 6y agoAnd you need approval and all, plus there's a bunch of terms and conditions…
- richrichardsson 6y agoLike living in one of the EU countries that Apple have decided are part of the EU rather than all of them. <grumbling from a Balkan EU country not on the list>
- velox_io 6y agoI'm quite interested in what Nvidia is planning. Nvidia purchased Mellanox last year (they make high-end network gear often used in compute clusters). Nvidia is very involved in machine learning with their GPUs. The only missing part of puzzle is CPUs which was either Intel or AMD (a direct competitor). ARM changes things and means they're not dependant on those companies (and the x86 licensing clusterfcuk preventing newcomers), and they have some room to tailor it to fit their needs (like Amazon & Google recently). These definitely are exciting times. Most Brits born in the 80's and 90's will have used Acorn computers in school, no one predicted that what would grow out of it (they weren't particularly fast).
- cbsks 6y agoNvidia has already embraced ARM, for example the Jetson machine learning platform is based on custom ARM SoCs: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
- ksec 6y agoNvidia is partnering with Ampere on ARM, and AMD on x86 (!). I would not be surprised if Nvidia made an offer down the line once they figure out whether Ampere is worth the money. Right now, getting Apps ported to ARM seems a lot more likely than AI / ML porting their work off CUDA. And I am thinking if CUDA will end up like Excel for Microsoft. It is not that we cant move off Excel, but the code and value running on CUDA / Excel will not be worth the effort porting away from it.
- russellbeattie 6y agoYou seem to have overlooked the Tegra X1, which powers 55+ million Nintendo Switches. Nvidia seems to already be invested in the ARM CPU market and doing relatively well. Their X2 powers the new Shield devices and who knows what else in the future. Yes, that's a very tiny number compared to the billions of CPUs made by Intel, Apple, AMD, Qualcomm and Samsung, but the point is, they are already doing ARM CPU integration and have carved out a decent niche for themselves.
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- lemoncucumber 6y agoHindsight is 20/20, but Intel selling off their ARM division (XScale) almost exactly a year before the first iPhone was announced looks like a pretty bad call in retrospect.
- jerrysievert 6y agoit gets worse. apple had apparently originally approached intel to build arm chips for the iPhone, and intel said no due it thinking it would never be successful: https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-the-mobile-chip-business-to-apples-ax-arm-application-processors https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/19/how-intel-lost-th...
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoIt's like Decca refusing to signup The Beatles.
- ethbro 6y agoIt's a fine call... if they could scale Atom down that low + eat the margin hit to gut ARM dev boards. Neither of which they executed on.
- jeffbee 6y agoThe only reason Intel owned it in the first place was because they lost a lawsuit with DEC. Intel has repeatedly shown that it is just not that into ARM.
- Ecco 6y agoDid Apple say they would move their entire line of Macs to Apple Silicon? I thought Federighi said they had « amazing » Intel-powered new Macs in their pipeline.
- abrowne 6y agoThere are Intel Macs in the pipeline because the switch is not instant, and they want to sell at least some Macs for the next 6–18 months.
- eyesee 6y agoYes, they announced a transition to Apple Silicon over two years. There are a few new Intel Macs left in the pipeline before everything switches over.
- agloeregrets 6y agoThis is how you don’t Osborne your product line. When they did this with PPC they said the same thing, buying a PPC Mac Mini ended up being a bad choice.
- dstaley 6y agoI was a bit surprised the article didn't mention Windows on ARM at all. Following the Apple announcement, I managed to snag a Windows laptop that uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 ARM SoC for dramatically less than MSRP on eBay. (To be fair, they were selling it for parts since they couldn't figure out how to remove the password. Wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows was easy enough.) For the most part, it feels just like Windows. Every app I've downloaded has _just worked_. That being said, there's definitely at least one app that won't (Wireguard since it requires an ARM64 driver to work). I've actually been tracking which software provides an ARM64 version[1]. Sadly, it looks like virtually every toolchain still needs to update to support ARM64 on Windows. I'm tracking a handful of GitHub issues, and support is definitely in the pipeline, but it's slow going. For example, .NET _still_ doesn't support Windows on ARM, despite the fact it's the flagship way to build apps on Windows, and ARM64 Windows devices have been available for almost two years. [1] https://iswindowsonarmready.netlify.app/ https://iswindowsonarmready.netlify.app/
- justinfrankel 6y agoIs plain win32 API supported on arm64/Windows? Is there a version of MSVC? Or does one use mingw?
- asdff 6y agoI wonder why apple is abandoning bootcamp if windows on ARM is fine?
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- toastal 6y agoMy fingers are crossed for Steam on ARM and distributing ARM binaries for games that devs cross-compiled. Given Valve's support for Linux, if an ARM client ran on Android too and could finally access my library on my phone, I'd be a happy customer.
- person_of_color 6y agoApple should start investigating a transition to RISC-V IMHO
- saagarjha 6y agoAnd throw away their billions of dollars in investments in making the fastest ARM processors for mobile devices?
- jabl 6y agoGiven that Apple was one of the original founders of Arm, and has an ARM architectural license (the most gold plated license Arm sells, basically allowing the customer to create their own chips implementing the ARM ISA), I'd guess Apple would be the last one to switch from Arm to RISC-V (assuming such a switch would ever happen).
- tedk-42 6y agoWoah. Isn't apple only licencing the ARM instruction set? They're still very much physically making their own chips riight? The A13 bionic wouldn't physically share any components built by ARM? If that's the case, it's like saying AMD use Intel chips, but really they just licence the instruction set
- mrpippy 6y agoThey’re designing their own chips, including their own CPU core (which implements the ARM instruction set). TSMC actually fabs them though. There may be some ancillary cores or blocks licensed from ARM, but nothing major.
- tedk-42 6y agoIthought so. Full credit to apple then for pioneering this effort. I appreciate some commenters saying the raspberry helped, but really it's apple who are the taking a big step forward with popularising a third player in the CPU space. Unless they are willing to sell their chipsets, I doubt it will affect consumer products much outside of their own ecosystem. Again nothing exciting for ARM, but more the future of apple chips
- Symmetry 6y agoThey definitely design the CPU but I wonder if they licence any IP for things like USB controllers or such? That would mean using ARM standard interfaces inside the chip and I can see upsides and downsides.
- spullara 6y agoApple Silicon are not ARM processors. They have ARM compatible instruction sets. They are not based on 3rd party ARM cores.
- ekianjo 6y ago> Of course this computer runs Linux and currently is being used to solve protein folding problems around developing a cure for COVID-19, similar to folding@home. This is a truly impressive warehouse of technology and shows where you can go with the ARM CPU and the open source Linux operating system. Extraordinary claim, but any evidence to support that Fugaku is super useful apart from making headlines?
- cromwellian 6y ago> The Intel world has stagnated in recent years, and I look forward to seeing the CPU market jump ahead again. Really? AMD's recent moves with Zen/Zen2/Zen3/EPYC look like a big step forward. Zen2 chiplets are the biggest change in years. Zen3 IPC is supposed to be significantly better than Zen2 (17%). The previous gen Ryzen was like 15w TDP, where as the A12Z in the Mac Mini ARM is 15w TDP, but the Zen crushes the A12Z Bionic on benchmarks. It's difficult for people to remember, but ARM came from really terrible performance to a spot where it is getting in the ballpark of x86, so the advancements look impressive, but that's like saying if I go from $100 to $200, the gains look impressive, whereas you only went from $10000 to $11000, it looks like you are standing relatively still in comparison. But x86 architectures are decades of maturity, so someone getting a 17% IPC lift (Zen2->Zen3) or a massive reduction in TDP on such a complex chip, isn't stagnation, it's actually MORE impressive IMHO. ARM is going to reach marginal returns, and soon the yearly perf boosts won't look as impressive anymore. In the end, I think we'll see convergence of performance. ARM will still have a power advantage on mobile, because they don't have so much backwards compatibility legacy that x86 has to support. However, are Macbooks and Mac Desktops going to be performance and price competitive with Linux x86? I doubt it. First of all, ARM vendors haven't even come close to the GPU performance of NVidia or AMD's discrete GPUs. An ARM A13 or Mali is not going to compete with a laptop with an RTX 2060, 3060, or RDNA1/2. And secondly, just looking at AMD, it's possible to lift performance / watt still in x86. I think the laptop space in the x86 realm is still exciting, because of what AMD and NVidia are doing.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou might find it interesting that Apple made some very suggestive statements at WWDC regarding graphics performance, like “don’t assume discrete graphics is better than integrated”. I think it might be interesting to wait a bit to see what they come out with.
- archi42 6y agoIn the PC world a discrete GPU means you get a second chip with a thermal/power budget of 70 to 200W. On a SoC the thermal budget is more limited, so even if they integrate nVidia IP on silicon, they can't clock it as high. Of course by "integrated" Apple could mean they just solder a GPU chip to the board. Or they built a surprisingly performant GPU core for their SoC, though I wouldn't expect it to be much faster than what AMD integrates in their CPUs (30% at most? Still much slower than discrete).
- giomasce 6y agoI would have preferred this to happens with RISC-V, though...
- sitkack 6y agoIt will and much sooner than you think. Everything that is making Arm attractive right now is applicable to RISC-V but even more so, since it is so much easier to add custom logic.
- kristianpaul 6y agoArticle should thank as well free and open source software like the Linux kernel and Operating Systems distribution like Debian/Openwrt that made posible to many people years ago start playing with same known software in multiple CPUs types usually without hassle.
- sameerds 6y agoI am not sure what to make of the fact that the article never says "X86", but keeps mentioning "Intel" and occasionally "AMD". Was that tailored to the expected audience, or the author is not confident enough about what "X86" means?