4 ms·

Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple Mini competitor?

ChrisLTD 3y ago
Raspberry Pi and their clones come close
mschuster91 3y ago
Raspberry Pi and its various competitors... the problem is you can't just go and buy ARM CPUs or boards if you're not either willing to upfront serious amounts of cash or have personal relations to Qualcomm and friends (which is how RPi got their in). You have a couple top tier vendors when it comes to actually performant SoCs: - Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel - Samsung, which use (almost) all their production for their own phones, tablets and TVs - I'm not aware of Samsung SoCs ending up in any third party product - Annapurna Labs, which belong to Amazon for a few years now, and whose SoCs end up being used in servers (both AWS themselves and third parties, QNAP uses a fair few of their models) - Qualcomm and Broadcom, who won't return your calls unless you're talking millions of dollars in volume, have all their documentation behind NDAs and have serious deviations from any kind of standards which is what makes supporting them in Android forks a huge pain in the ass, and even the RPi chipset lacks behind severely in something as basic as PCIe, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697 - Mediatek and Rockchip which are even worse than the above two regarding documentation/standards/BSP quality, but you seem to stand a chance acquiring one of their chips even if you're small volume - almost all el-cheapo/gongkai devices and RPi competitors are based on their chips - NVIDIA with their Tegra lineup which seems to be used only on the Nintendo Switch, a few settop boxes and automotive That's more than in the x86/64 ecosystem on paper, where the only players left in town are Intel and AMD... but these are based on some common standardized core around BIOS/UEFI/PCI, there is no such thing in the entire ARM space. If you want to design a device using ARM, you're left either relying on a more-or-less open BSP from the vendor or doing everything including the bootloader yourself, and it's left to each SoC/board vendor on how to wire stuff like sensors (yes, I'm aware of device trees, but they don't come close to the easiness of x86/64). In total, it's a fuckton of work for very low gain as the market share for desktop ARM (Apple aside) just isn't there.
- RunSet 3y ago
  > Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel Also limited in terms of running Linux on it, since the poster you replied to asked about that.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    At least the incentive for highly skilled reverse engineers is there and it's showing in pretty solid support [2] and contributions. For example Apple is known for re-using SoC blocks across many generations - according to an (admittedly unsourced, but I've seen it stated multiple times) HN comment [1], the UART has been the same since the first iPhone through all the years past including M1/M2 machines, whereas Samsung alone has four incompatible variations, and all the other vendors each have their own idea as well, while the entirety of x86 can be spoken to in bare-metal assembler. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942 [2] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- smolder 3y ago
  > Apple [...] has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency This is overstated. There are some benchmarks M2 does amazingly at, partly due to a super wide memory bus shared by the GPU. Power efficiency on performance desktop x86 is much worse than M2, but efficiency is comparable with lower TDP x86 SKUs and server chips. If you're comparing M1/M2 chips to apple x86, you are looking at obsolete x86. Otherwise, I think it's buying into the hype just a bit much to say x86 is inarguably behind by far.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
It's wild to me there's no clear answer for this; it seems like such an obvious product! Raspberry Pi is neat but not quite powerful enough, particularly when it comes to disk IO.
Aromasin 3y ago
Try looking at ARM Embedded Single Boards. They're only ever marketed to industry for smart automation/IoT systems, but effectively fill the niche you're looking for: https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-boards/arm/embedded-single-board-computers-sbc-arm https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-... I've saved a few during my years of lab management as they ran our infrastructure, and they're cracking PCs. Sometimes I run into fringe issues with drivers, but never anything major. Pretty much all validated on Linux OS too, so better support than most client PCs.

Raspberry Pi and their clones come close

Raspberry Pi and its various competitors... the problem is you can't just go and buy ARM CPUs or boards if you're not either willing to upfront serious amounts of cash or have personal relations to Qualcomm and friends (which is how RPi got their in). You have a couple top tier vendors when it comes to actually performant SoCs: - Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel - Samsung, which use (almost) all their production for their own phones, tablets and TVs - I'm not aware of Samsung SoCs ending up in any third party product - Annapurna Labs, which belong to Amazon for a few years now, and whose SoCs end up being used in servers (both AWS themselves and third parties, QNAP uses a fair few of their models) - Qualcomm and Broadcom, who won't return your calls unless you're talking millions of dollars in volume, have all their documentation behind NDAs and have serious deviations from any kind of standards which is what makes supporting them in Android forks a huge pain in the ass, and even the RPi chipset lacks behind severely in something as basic as PCIe, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697 - Mediatek and Rockchip which are even worse than the above two regarding documentation/standards/BSP quality, but you seem to stand a chance acquiring one of their chips even if you're small volume - almost all el-cheapo/gongkai devices and RPi competitors are based on their chips - NVIDIA with their Tegra lineup which seems to be used only on the Nintendo Switch, a few settop boxes and automotive That's more than in the x86/64 ecosystem on paper, where the only players left in town are Intel and AMD... but these are based on some common standardized core around BIOS/UEFI/PCI, there is no such thing in the entire ARM space. If you want to design a device using ARM, you're left either relying on a more-or-less open BSP from the vendor or doing everything including the bootloader yourself, and it's left to each SoC/board vendor on how to wire stuff like sensors (yes, I'm aware of device trees, but they don't come close to the easiness of x86/64). In total, it's a fuckton of work for very low gain as the market share for desktop ARM (Apple aside) just isn't there.

RunSet 3y ago
> Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel Also limited in terms of running Linux on it, since the poster you replied to asked about that.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  At least the incentive for highly skilled reverse engineers is there and it's showing in pretty solid support [2] and contributions. For example Apple is known for re-using SoC blocks across many generations - according to an (admittedly unsourced, but I've seen it stated multiple times) HN comment [1], the UART has been the same since the first iPhone through all the years past including M1/M2 machines, whereas Samsung alone has four incompatible variations, and all the other vendors each have their own idea as well, while the entirety of x86 can be spoken to in bare-metal assembler. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942 [2] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
smolder 3y ago
> Apple [...] has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency This is overstated. There are some benchmarks M2 does amazingly at, partly due to a super wide memory bus shared by the GPU. Power efficiency on performance desktop x86 is much worse than M2, but efficiency is comparable with lower TDP x86 SKUs and server chips. If you're comparing M1/M2 chips to apple x86, you are looking at obsolete x86. Otherwise, I think it's buying into the hype just a bit much to say x86 is inarguably behind by far.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

It's wild to me there's no clear answer for this; it seems like such an obvious product! Raspberry Pi is neat but not quite powerful enough, particularly when it comes to disk IO.

Aromasin 3y ago

Try looking at ARM Embedded Single Boards. They're only ever marketed to industry for smart automation/IoT systems, but effectively fill the niche you're looking for: https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-boards/arm/embedded-single-board-computers-sbc-arm https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-... I've saved a few during my years of lab management as they ran our infrastructure, and they're cracking PCs. Sometimes I run into fringe issues with drivers, but never anything major. Pretty much all validated on Linux OS too, so better support than most client PCs.