4 ms·

> The problem that Qualcomm and all the other ARM manufacturers have: they're impossible for tinkerers to get ahold of This sounds more like a problem tinkerer

> The problem that Qualcomm and all the other ARM manufacturers have: they're impossible for tinkerers to get ahold of This sounds more like a problem tinkerers have rather than a problem that Qualcomm or ARM manufacturers have. Qualcomm doesn't care about the tinkerers so it's not a problem to them. Embedded ARM systems like my router or smart thermostat seem fine. Google controls Android and it also seems fine for 99% of their users. There are thousands of Android developers. There are ARM boot standards like https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0029/latest/ https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0029/latest/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur... But in general embedded device makers don't care about having a common boot system. They want to make their device as cheaply as possible. If the common standard helps them do that then they would adopt it. Otherwise it is unnecessary overhead. So what do you actually want? A cheap desktop level ARM system? I doubt that is going to happen. The number of people who want such a thing is extremely low even though places like Hacker News make it seem like it would be popular.

amluto 3y ago
> Qualcomm doesn't care about the tinkerers so it's not a problem to them. Qualcomm is selling performance. Performance is a combination of the hardware and the tubing that developers do to make their products perform well on the hardware. On x86 or M1/M2, developers develop on those chips. Graviton and Qualcomm trail significantly in this regard.
- lizknope 3y ago
  Listening to the Qualcomm management they seemed more interested in selling licenses to technology than actual physical products. But Qualcomm is selling more than just performance. Cost, quality, schedule, delivery of products. Qualcomm has shown they can make an SoC good enough satisfy a lot of phone manufacturers and there are thousands of Android developers and applications. Would the Qualcomm / Google / Android ecosystem be better if they opened up more of the hardware specs to tinkerers? Maybe but I don't think they care or they don't see the business case. Apple's ecosystem is even more closed and their performance seems to be better in general. I sat in a lot of all hands meetings when I was there listening to revenue and profit breakdown. The QTL licensing division was far more profitable than the QCT hardware division. These numbers are publicly available.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Anyone can easily develop on Graviton. The solution is to do as we did back when everyone on the company shared UNIX development servers. There wasn't an Aix tower under my desk.
mschuster91 3y ago
What I want is anything ARM that's actually general purpose (i.e. no SoC whose BSP only is usable on Android or whose IO peripherals barely meet standards), with full Linux upstream support for all components, and at least some performance compared to your average Intel i5. The status quo is that the most powerful general-purpose ARM system you can get is an RPi or its clones (which both fail the performance test, and outside of the RPi a lot fail the Linux test), as the only ones actually able to buy high-performance CPUs are phone manufacturers and large hardware ODMs such as QNAP (who're using Annapurna CPUs IIRC). Apple is the "compromise" - extremely high performance, to a tune no one other matches, but sparsely documented/supported by anything not macOS (as Asahi Linux shows), and a price tag to match.
- imtringued 3y ago
  Nothing stops you from buying this machine https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platfor... (except the poor performance Vs cheaper x86 processors).
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Yeah... 2.666 $ and a lead time of 3 weeks. That's exactly the kind of bullshit I'm talking about - the target class for this is embedded developers, but not tinkerers and ordinary developers, the latter of whom you need as a platform the most.
    - lizknope 3y ago
      > AADP is a prototyping system targeting general embedded applications based on the COM-HPC Ampere Altra module and a reference carrier board, the COM-HPC Server Base. They do use the term embedded on that site which I thought was strange. Ampere is an ARM server startup. Their big customer so far is Oracle who sells Ampere cloud instances. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ I've worked at multiple companies with ARM architectural licenses including ARM itself. No one there cares about making a non embedded, non server, chip in a system at a price equivalent to a desktop or laptop x86 system that you can buy from Newegg / Best Buy. You may think it is cool but no one is going to make it for you. The trend for ARM is to continue down the embedded way and at the hyperscale data center area like Amazon Graviton and their competitors with their own custom ARM server chips. Since they are custom you won't be able to buy one to put in your house, only rent it in their cloud. Ampere is a startup so their goal is to get bought by a big company. I don't know how much longer you will even be able to buy that system. What is the actual price and performance point that you would pay as in the exact amount of dollars? Go talk to the marketing departments of these companies. They have already looked at this. They think the market is tiny and know the investment would be hundreds of millions and is not worth it. Why do you want an ARM system so bad? What is wrong with x86 for the non embedded / non server / middle desktop range? Literally billions of people are fine with x86 in this range.

amluto 3y ago

> Qualcomm doesn't care about the tinkerers so it's not a problem to them. Qualcomm is selling performance. Performance is a combination of the hardware and the tubing that developers do to make their products perform well on the hardware. On x86 or M1/M2, developers develop on those chips. Graviton and Qualcomm trail significantly in this regard.

lizknope 3y ago
Listening to the Qualcomm management they seemed more interested in selling licenses to technology than actual physical products. But Qualcomm is selling more than just performance. Cost, quality, schedule, delivery of products. Qualcomm has shown they can make an SoC good enough satisfy a lot of phone manufacturers and there are thousands of Android developers and applications. Would the Qualcomm / Google / Android ecosystem be better if they opened up more of the hardware specs to tinkerers? Maybe but I don't think they care or they don't see the business case. Apple's ecosystem is even more closed and their performance seems to be better in general. I sat in a lot of all hands meetings when I was there listening to revenue and profit breakdown. The QTL licensing division was far more profitable than the QCT hardware division. These numbers are publicly available.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 3y ago
Anyone can easily develop on Graviton. The solution is to do as we did back when everyone on the company shared UNIX development servers. There wasn't an Aix tower under my desk.

mschuster91 3y ago

What I want is anything ARM that's actually general purpose (i.e. no SoC whose BSP only is usable on Android or whose IO peripherals barely meet standards), with full Linux upstream support for all components, and at least some performance compared to your average Intel i5. The status quo is that the most powerful general-purpose ARM system you can get is an RPi or its clones (which both fail the performance test, and outside of the RPi a lot fail the Linux test), as the only ones actually able to buy high-performance CPUs are phone manufacturers and large hardware ODMs such as QNAP (who're using Annapurna CPUs IIRC). Apple is the "compromise" - extremely high performance, to a tune no one other matches, but sparsely documented/supported by anything not macOS (as Asahi Linux shows), and a price tag to match.

imtringued 3y ago
Nothing stops you from buying this machine https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platfor... (except the poor performance Vs cheaper x86 processors).
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Yeah... 2.666 $ and a lead time of 3 weeks. That's exactly the kind of bullshit I'm talking about - the target class for this is embedded developers, but not tinkerers and ordinary developers, the latter of whom you need as a platform the most.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    > AADP is a prototyping system targeting general embedded applications based on the COM-HPC Ampere Altra module and a reference carrier board, the COM-HPC Server Base. They do use the term embedded on that site which I thought was strange. Ampere is an ARM server startup. Their big customer so far is Oracle who sells Ampere cloud instances. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/compute/arm/ I've worked at multiple companies with ARM architectural licenses including ARM itself. No one there cares about making a non embedded, non server, chip in a system at a price equivalent to a desktop or laptop x86 system that you can buy from Newegg / Best Buy. You may think it is cool but no one is going to make it for you. The trend for ARM is to continue down the embedded way and at the hyperscale data center area like Amazon Graviton and their competitors with their own custom ARM server chips. Since they are custom you won't be able to buy one to put in your house, only rent it in their cloud. Ampere is a startup so their goal is to get bought by a big company. I don't know how much longer you will even be able to buy that system. What is the actual price and performance point that you would pay as in the exact amount of dollars? Go talk to the marketing departments of these companies. They have already looked at this. They think the market is tiny and know the investment would be hundreds of millions and is not worth it. Why do you want an ARM system so bad? What is wrong with x86 for the non embedded / non server / middle desktop range? Literally billions of people are fine with x86 in this range.