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The best you can get right now are some NXP parts from Solid-Run (bulky form factor for mobile, no GPU), the Nvidia Xavier/Orin series mobile SoCs, or some of t
by aseipp 4y ago
The best you can get right now are some NXP parts from Solid-Run (bulky form factor for mobile, no GPU), the Nvidia Xavier/Orin series mobile SoCs, or some of the newer Snapdragon devices (I'm not familiar with these.) These (all) support UEFI, too. But they are all vastly more expensive in almost every way vs an Apple Silicon device running Linux, and offer worse performance and less CPU features except Snapdragon, it's true. And all of them including Apple Silicon still have quirks.
Part of might be that -- and this is just an observation, speculation -- nobody seems to be licensing newer core designs in high volumes outside of server-class chips or explicit mobile SKUs. That means there's no volume to drip down to consumer parts. Everything is either a mobile SoC design or a high-margin server SKU, there's no mid-range option for a modern ARMv8.5 core -- which happens to be exactly the kind of device Apple targets with something like the Macbook Air.
The rumor is that Nvidia is aiming to get the Xavier/Orin series devices to have full upstream Linux support (GPU acceleration is a different story and needs Mesa, but may come later I suspect, since both the mobile and desktop GPU drivers are now open.) If that happens I think these would probably be the best alternative options you could get, in potentially mobile form factors -- but they are still much pricier when considering performance.
- sliken 4y agoNvidia desktop GPU drivers are not open. They recently published some include files that make it a bit easier to communicate with and helps the Noveau projects. You can't drive a Nvidia GPU with anywhere near the same performance/functionality with an open source driver. Corrections welcome.
- wmf 4y agoIn theory in the future you'll be able to use the GPL kernel driver with Noveau to have a fully open-source driver stack with not great not terrible performance. It's not clear when that future will arrive.
- sliken 4y agoThat fits, seems like Nvidia is heading in the same direction AMD did years ago, but is a long ways from nearing the functionality and performance of the binary driver.
- mardifoufs 4y agoI might be totally wrong, as I haven't looked into the details (and I'm not familiar with nouveau either), but I thought they released more than include files? It seems like this[0] is the full kernel driver source (though only for recent nvidia GPUs). But userspace components are still closed source, so that might be what you are referring to. Though surely the kernel drivers are useful for more than just communicating with nouveau? [0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
- sliken 4y agoAh, right, full kernel source, but it's really just a shim to user a user space driver. It does help make Nouveau's job easier, but it far from a usable driver.
- salawat 4y agoIt does nothing to help nouveau, since their biggest issue is at the firmware level. Nouveau cannot reclock modern cards due to HS mode and the cryptographic shenanigans that locks you into a binary blob signed by Nvidia.