5 ms·

Arm snatched Intel's hold on the Apple market and we can invoke any Clayton Christensen book on the Raspberry PI series. Maybe not the Raspberry PI 5, but what

Arm snatched Intel's hold on the Apple market and we can invoke any Clayton Christensen book on the Raspberry PI series. Maybe not the Raspberry PI 5, but what about say, the imaginary 8 or the 9 a few years hence? The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks.

mschuster91 3y ago
Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Windows world, no one holds even closely to the capabilities required for a transition to ARM: Microsoft doesn't have a fat binary standard or the toolchains needed (that all went down the drain with the end of Microsoft Windows CE / Windows Phone and even then, it was a nightmare to develop for these), the third party developers - especially the enterprise tailor-made application market - have zero experience with ARM and a lot of stuff used in enterprise was made by companies that went defunct long ago, Microsoft doesn't have any hold over what the device vendors do in terms of drivers (unlike Apple, who famously cut ties with NVIDIA because NV didn't want Apple to write drivers for their GPUs), and neither Microsoft itself nor the conglomerate of hardware OEMs has the cash in hand to take all the stuff people use on x86 Windows and make it work on ARM Windows (as they infamously discovered with the early Windows Qualcomm stuff). Oh, and the ARM vendors can't be bothered to get something as basic as PCIe working on a fundamental level beyond "if it works in my very specific use case, ship it" - just look at the RPi 4's issues where people developed breakout boards for PCIe only to discover that crucial functionality was flat out broken [1]. And even with people complaining for years about PCIe issues on the Pi 4, turns out the Pi 5 still managed to fuck things up [2]. The only player in town able to make ARM work on anything but smartphones and servers is Apple, and they don't (and never will, assuming regulators don't finally wake up and force them) sell to third parties. > The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks. These things are and will be toys. The money is in getting corporate to switch over to ARM and until the problems above (especially backwards compatibility and standards conformance) are worked out, which I don't see happen any time soon because it's so hard to break through the chicken-egg scenario, there will be no threat to Intel. Especially not if even many years of development and complaining are not enough to arse Broadcom into fixing PCIe. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-card-test-gpus-on-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-... [2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspberry-pi-5 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation. What they don't have and Apple has is 10+ experience in shipping tailor made ARM chips fit to their needs, because they always left chip design to their partners, as they were always a SW company first not a HW product company like Apple, and this isn't something they can start and catch up with in the snap of a finger.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. The entire NT stuff has gone down the drain. The last non-x86 platforms were dropped around 2000 [1] until ARM entered the picture in 2012, but the latter was mostly used for Windows Phone for many years which itself got discontinued around 2017. All these many thousand human-years of experience have long ago retired or went to other companies, their institutional knowledge is effectively lost for Microsoft. And that is the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
    - dboreham 3y ago
      Cutler is still there :)
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        As per his last interview, nowadays busy porting GNU/Linux into XBox running on Azure, for AI workloads when they are idle. Somehow there is a certain irony on that.
    - Kwpolska 3y ago
jacquesm 3y ago
I have a Pi 400 here and for the money it's most impressive. It runs pretty much the whole house in terms of heating and power management, with full autonomy using HA and a very limited bit of custom stuff. You can stick in anything at all and it 'just works' the only things that have given me a headache are Zigbee dongles, everything else worked without issue.

mschuster91 3y ago

Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Windows world, no one holds even closely to the capabilities required for a transition to ARM: Microsoft doesn't have a fat binary standard or the toolchains needed (that all went down the drain with the end of Microsoft Windows CE / Windows Phone and even then, it was a nightmare to develop for these), the third party developers - especially the enterprise tailor-made application market - have zero experience with ARM and a lot of stuff used in enterprise was made by companies that went defunct long ago, Microsoft doesn't have any hold over what the device vendors do in terms of drivers (unlike Apple, who famously cut ties with NVIDIA because NV didn't want Apple to write drivers for their GPUs), and neither Microsoft itself nor the conglomerate of hardware OEMs has the cash in hand to take all the stuff people use on x86 Windows and make it work on ARM Windows (as they infamously discovered with the early Windows Qualcomm stuff). Oh, and the ARM vendors can't be bothered to get something as basic as PCIe working on a fundamental level beyond "if it works in my very specific use case, ship it" - just look at the RPi 4's issues where people developed breakout boards for PCIe only to discover that crucial functionality was flat out broken [1]. And even with people complaining for years about PCIe issues on the Pi 4, turns out the Pi 5 still managed to fuck things up [2]. The only player in town able to make ARM work on anything but smartphones and servers is Apple, and they don't (and never will, assuming regulators don't finally wake up and force them) sell to third parties. > The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks. These things are and will be toys. The money is in getting corporate to switch over to ARM and until the problems above (especially backwards compatibility and standards conformance) are worked out, which I don't see happen any time soon because it's so hard to break through the chicken-egg scenario, there will be no threat to Intel. Especially not if even many years of development and complaining are not enough to arse Broadcom into fixing PCIe. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-card-test-gpus-on-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-... [2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspberry-pi-5 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation. What they don't have and Apple has is 10+ experience in shipping tailor made ARM chips fit to their needs, because they always left chip design to their partners, as they were always a SW company first not a HW product company like Apple, and this isn't something they can start and catch up with in the snap of a finger.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. The entire NT stuff has gone down the drain. The last non-x86 platforms were dropped around 2000 [1] until ARM entered the picture in 2012, but the latter was mostly used for Windows Phone for many years which itself got discontinued around 2017. All these many thousand human-years of experience have long ago retired or went to other companies, their institutional knowledge is effectively lost for Microsoft. And that is the problem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Cutler is still there :)
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      As per his last interview, nowadays busy porting GNU/Linux into XBox running on Azure, for AI workloads when they are idle. Somehow there is a certain irony on that.
  - Kwpolska 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

I have a Pi 400 here and for the money it's most impressive. It runs pretty much the whole house in terms of heating and power management, with full autonomy using HA and a very limited bit of custom stuff. You can stick in anything at all and it 'just works' the only things that have given me a headache are Zigbee dongles, everything else worked without issue.