Yep it keeps getting faster and faster.

Someone just needs to work on some open-source GPU for it, otherwise it’ll still have some of the usual shortcomings of many ARM SoCs.

“RISC is good.”

• Dade Murphy

I mean, different use cases yeah? There’s certainly a big market for people that just do the basics on their devices, ie email, web browsing, documents/spreadsheets etc that don’t need a full blown powerhouse computer, nevermind that they have no clue what an operating system even is nor do they care, as long as they get their memes and cat videos in between work tasks.

I’ll bet there will always be an x86 segment of the market for gamers, power users, tinkerers, and the like. Though, that market may unfortunately shrink in the coming years that could lead to vendors abandoning the space, which could lead to fewer choices and higher component prices. On top of which, major venders might see it as an opportunity for lock-in and advertising, so yeah it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

The sliver of hope here is that the hacking community has always found ways around proprietary bullshit, and we can only hope and support that those efforts continue, lest we further our race in to a stupid corporate dystopia.

You’re definitely right in terms of arbitrary OS installation, some folks have got Ubuntu running on Lenovo snapdragon laptops recently.

The lack of “portability” though is a bit troubling, it seems each device (tree) has to be manually added, developed, tested, and have an install image created for it, unless I’m missing something. And this will be arduous and potentially problematic for corner cases or small numbers of adopters of a particular machine model (so basically the same as right now I guess).

But it’s not standard.

What made PCs take off was the BIOS war, which occurred because manufacturers were dependent on 3rd party OS’s, which were still competing for dominance.

Some SBCs only boot from said SD card though, while some do support more robust media. However, too many images are presuming you boot from SD which is a pita.

With or without Das Uboot, they still rely on board specific firmware (even Uboot is customised for many boards to make it work). OSes that state they do support aarch64, often require to have UEFI on your system so no way they are gonna boot on e.g. your Raspberry Pi.

Add to that, that is unlikely that browsers compiled for arm64 will have feature parity with their x86-64 counterparts. Goodbye Digitale Rights Management, and with that goodbye services like Tidal or Spotify (unless you run an OS that is still supported by their apps).

I was gonna say I thought Raspi was ARM.

“usually”

I am a raspberry pi owner (actually I’ve owned like a dozen and still own 8). And a pinephone owner.

And even on those very open devices, booting alternate OSes is less straightforward than on x86.

I think it will not take long until there is a cell phone/PC hybrid: you plug your cell phone into a base and can use it with a normal desktop interface on a screen with mouse and keyboard. A bit like the Nintendo switch.

Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life

Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.

The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.

I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons

• I lose about 5% charge/day with my laptop asleep. It does wake up very quickly, but 5%/day feels like a lot. At this point, I don’t think Microsoft has a strong incentive to really optimize the kernal for efficiency
• Historic massive variability in hardware across devices also makes it hard to optimize efficiency, although the current crop of snapdragon x laptops seem to have less variability
• One of the strengths of windows is that it can run applications written 20+ years ago fairly reliably. There’s a ton of software that’s still floating around that hasn’t been actively supported in years. I don’t see all of these software companies desiring to port their code over, especially without guarantees that the market will adopt ARM (the Apple approach) or until they see the ARM adoption rate go up (the current Windows approach)

All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.

Cannot wait to see their solution.

That is a long shot at best. Games are hungry for power and resources, and adding an emulation layer, even a transpilation system between x86 code and ARM processor will not actually improve the situation.

It’s not just the surface devices anymore. In June this year, a fresh wave of ARM powered laptops from a verity of different OEs launched. There are offerings from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, etc.

I’ve seen worse. A group at the university was using the IBM mainframe for basically everything from their terminals. To reduce load on the mainframe, the university spent a load of money to buy a cluster of workstations with crazy specs and software, each one more expensive than a big new car back then.

I visited them shortly after they got those killer machines. For comparison: in our university department, we had green serial terminals connected to an old VAX 11/780. They had those shiny new workstations with GUI on high-resolution (for that time) color monitors. My friend there logged in - and his autostart just opened two terminal sessions on the IBM mainframe, where he did all his work just like before. He was happy that he had the terminals in a windowed environment, though, so he could easily open and handle several sessions on the machine at the same time.

Jira is the new reason we need to constantly upgrade

Apple took all the old tricks Intel was always way too cheap to use, and turned them to 11.

Nothing magic, nothing special, just balls and the willingness to spend silicon.

It’s amazing what a modern process node and not cranking clock speeds to high hell will do.

It actually can, the thing we learned is that the unpleasant bits of x86 scale well, so we spent 30% of the die doing uop decode, but that’s now just 1-2% because we blow so much on more registers and cache.

Also we can play games like soft-deprecating instructions and features so they exist, but are stupid slow in microcode.

We used to think only risc could run fast at low power, but our current cisc decoded to risc works fine, Intel just got stupid lazy.

Apple just took all the tradeoffs Intel was too cheap to spend silicon on and turned them to 11, we could have had them before but all the arm guys were basically buying ip and didn’t invest in physically optimized designs, but now that tsmc is the main game in town (fallback to gf was nice for price), there’s a lot more room to rely on their cell libraries.

Intel got so insanely arrogant, just like Boeing and all the other catastrophic American failures right now, we just need to correct for that and we can be decent again.

ISA doesn’t matter as much as most people think it does. It’s all about how you implement it.

Asus Zenfones used to use Intel Atom x86 processors.

RISC-V is where ARM was a few years ago. It’ll be a ship shaker, too, if it keeps developing at this rate. But, for now at least, we have ARM and clunky old (solid) x86 as the major players.

Do you have good resources to read on risc-v. I hear about it a lot, but haven’t found meaningful resources (to me) on it.

Thanks