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Better (or simply more) ARM processors, no matter who makes them, are a win. They tend to be far more power-efficient, and with performance-per-watt improving e
by darkamaul 11mo ago
Better (or simply more) ARM processors, no matter who makes them, are a win. They tend to be far more power-efficient, and with performance-per-watt improving each generation, pushing for wider ARM adoption is a practical step toward lowering overall energy consumption.
- coffeebeqn 11mo agoHow is running desktop Linux on these?
- hmlwilliams 11mo agoI run desktop linux via postmarketOS on a Lenovo Duet 5 (Snapdragon 7c). It isn't the most powerful device and the webcam doesn't work but other than that it works well and battery life is excellent
- fransje26 11mo ago> the webcam doesn't work But.. ..why? Of all things, I would have expected the webcam to not be cpu-related..
- avhception 11mo agoIIRC, it's because the ARM designs tend to use camera modules that come from smartphone-land. Cameras used on x86-64 usually just work using that usb webcam standard driver (what is that called again? uvcvideo?). But these smartphone-land cameras don't adhere to that standard, they probably don't connect using USB. They are designed to be used with the SoC vendor's downstream fork of Android or whatever, using proprietary blobs.
- viraptor 11mo agoA similar thing is happening in Intel land recently, where the cameras use ipu6 / ipu7 chips rather than dumping simple frames over USB. But this way we get a higher resolution / quality at least.
- throwaway173738 11mo agoIt’s usually MIPI or some variant. There’s probably a way to enable the video stream but you also have to talk to the control module itself which is on a different bus.
- ara07 11mo agoWhat about the audio ? The documentation says audio doesnt work as well. did you find a way to solve it or it came solved when you installed ?
- mattan138 11mo agoI recently installed PostmarketOS and ran into the audio issue as well. It is resolved by editing the rt5682-max98357a/HiFi.conf file to change the playback channels from 2 to 4. There is extra bit to clean up, but that is the simple fix. See here: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/discussions/240#discussioncomment-10690792 https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/discussions/240#di...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ahoka 11mo agoAre ARM processors inherently power efficient? I doubt. Performance per watt is increasing due to the lithography. Also, Devon’s paradox.
- ggm 11mo agoAside from lithography there's clever design. I don't think you can quantify that but it's not nothing.
- eb0la 11mo agoActually power efficiency was a side effect of having a straightforward design in the first ARM processor. The BBC needed a cheap (but powerful) processor for the Acort computer and a RISC chip was When ARM started testing their processor, they found out it draw very little power... ... the rest is history.
- delaminator 11mo agoThe BBC Micro had a 6502
- iainmerrick 11mo agoYou're getting your history mixed up. Acorn won the bid to make the original BBC home computer, with a 6502-based design. Acorn later designed their own 32-bit chip, the ARM, to try to leapfrog their competitors who were moving to the 68000 or 386, and later spun off ARM as a separate company.
- jorvi 11mo agoThey aren't inherently power efficient because of technical reasons, but because of design culture reasons. Traditionally x86 has been built powerful and power hungry and then designers scaled the chips down whereas it's the opposite for ARM. For whatever reason, this also makes it possible to get much bigger YoY performance gains in ARM. The Apple M4 is a mature design[0] and yet a year later the M5 is CPU +15% GPU +30% memory bandwidth +28%. The Snapdragon Elite X series is showing a similar trajectory. So Jim Keller ended up being wrong that ISA doesn't matter. Its just that it's the people in the ISA that matter, not the silicon. [0] its design traces all the way back to the A12 from 2018, and in some fundamental ways even to the A10 from 2016.
- pjmlp 11mo agoWith the caveat that ARM isn't a industry standard like PC has become, thus while propritary OSes can thrive, FOSS has a much higher challenge other than OEM specific distros or downstream forks. Stuff like this, https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Microsoft-Corporation/dp/1572317167 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Microsoft-Corporation/dp/15723171...
- antonkochubey 11mo agoThere are the Arm SystemReady and ServerReady requirements/specifications that enable generic board support by the OSes.
- pjmlp 11mo agoThanks, I thought we were still on device trees and little else.
- jakogut 11mo agoPractically speaking, very few systems actually support SystemReady. There's an experimental port of edk2 for the Raspberry Pi, but some hardware is unavailable when using it.
- jabl 11mo agoThe ARM server platforms seem quite decent here? But yeah, pick any small dev board and I suspect it looks quite different.
- pezezin 11mo agoIt's weird that the book is titled "PC98", because PC-98 usually refers to NEC's line of x86 but not IBM PC compatible computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 Which I think reinforces your argument: there were non-standard x86 platforms, but thankfully they died out. Given the situation of the home computer industry during the 8 and 16-bit eras, it is a small miracle that we ended up having an open industry standard.
- high_na_euv 11mo agoISA is not that relevant, it is all about what you want to achieve with your CPU
- usrusr 11mo agoFor a CPU vendor, ISA is very relevant: most buyers will start their buying decision with ISA choice already fixed, and a vendor who can't offer a CPU with that ISA simply isn't in the race. It does not matter whether you are a believer in horses for courses when it comes to ISA, or a believer in "frontend ISA does not matter because it's all translated away anyways": when buyers don't want what you have, you are out. And buyers are more like a stampeding herd than like rational actors when it comes to ISA choice. I'd see offering CPU for multiple ISA as an important hedge against the herd changing direction.
- high_na_euv 11mo agoThe context is: ISA's peformance and efficiency characteristics
- usrusr 11mo agoWhat AMD wants to achieve with their CPU: sell them, preferably at a nice profit. If ISA is truly not relevant for performance and efficiency characteristics, all the more reason for them to not bet on any particular ISA but spread out, to already be there wherever the buying herd goes.
- snarfy 11mo agoMeh, performance-per-watt is not what everybody wants. I only want it in that it affords more raw performance by allowing more watts to be pumped through it without thermal overload. But if that can't actually happen then I'm still more interested in x86. Sure the lights dim when I turn my PC on, but I want the performance.