Arm based rival to your x86 home pc?
 

Background: It appears Apple are switching processors yet again from X86 to Arm, which seems to be a vote of confidence in Arm. I hardly expect Apple CPUs or SBCs to come on the market. But Apple obviously sees the potential in Arm.

Question: Now the software is there to run linux on Arm, but is the hardware? What's the best offering? Is it the RazPi 4?

Raspberry Pi 400

For a home computer, it's just that bit faster than the RPi4B/GB, but it makes enough of a difference to now be my main desktop computer. :)

(It's basically as good as my Intel desktop micro for what I do daily.)

The Raspberry Pi would be your best bet at the moment. Either the 4B or the 400. You'll have to add some storage to either though. It would be a good time to add in a NAS if you don't have one already.

There is also the Pinebook Pro. It, like some of the Raspberry Pi units, is out of stock but I expect that they are likely to do another production run.

However, the M1 chip in the new Apple is not for general-purpose computing. It is for vendor lock-in. So you are not going to get a general-purpose operating system on it, unless maybe inside a VM inside MacOS:

"Your Computer Isn't Yours" (2020)
https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

"Macs are a privacy nightmare" (2020)
https://www.osnews.com/story/132577/...acy-nightmare/

"Richard Stallman Was Right All Along" (2012)
https://www.osnews.com/story/25469/r...ght-all-along/

I suspect they collect enough pre-orders first, then do another production run.
For the non-pro PB I sent an email that I want one, then, many months later, I got a reply asking if I'm still interested, and had to commit to it (pay). After that it took a few more weeks to get the device.

BTW, no 11" model for the pinebook pro? :(

My first computer was a RPi 3B, so 1gb RAM, quad core arm cpu. I used it as my main computer for quite a while. It was able to do just about anything I needed(if I waited long enough;)) In fact the only thing I can remember that I couldn't do was the distort? feature on the gimp.

Some other things I noticed was during winter things worked so much better than summer. Another thing was power, I finally found the right combo to properly power it but undervolting could be a problem.

Of course the rpi 4 is a completely different beast. Much faster, so yes ARM has great potential under Linux.

I seen an interesting bit about ARM Macs. Supposedly you are able to run signed/unsigned x86_64 apps on ARM. However if you compile your app on ARM, you will have to sign it in order for other people to run it. It'll basically become like the iOS walled garden.

There's load of ARM hardware out there in sbc's and also ARM servers have been a thing for some time now. While it's good there's competition, I'm not Arm's biggest fan.
What I am looking forward to is RISC-V maturing.

My guess is you'll be waiting. When CPUs were 8 bit, things like the Z80 had 1,2,3, or 4 byte Assembler instructions. Once they went 16bit, you had 65536 instructions; on 32bit, 4G instructions, etc. So all instructions are one byte or at most 3, for a 128-bit read. My point really is, RISC is interesting for academia, but not commercially. Too much work required to get it into an ASIC but no profit on offer, because it's open source. The MMX instructions also greatly shortened block copies

So, risc is interesting but not viable. RISC means reduced instruction set. The first stage to make it viable is surely risc -->cisc. Consequently, Who will make it? Nobody even filled out that for things like block copy. Nearly any proprietary design makes more business sense.

You're probably, unfortunately, right - I remember some years ago when Sun tried open-sourcing some of SPARC (I think it was the T-series) and obviously that went so well that we all use SPARC now...:rolleyes:

Re: ARM on desktop - apart from Raspberry Pi and Pine's laptops, Pine also has the RockPro SBC, and there's other (similar but in some cases maybe faster (or faster for some tasks)) SBCs like Orange Pi, LibreComputer, Asus SBC/TinkerBoard, ODroid, and nVidia Jetson. I'm not sure how 'good' any of these are as a total desktop replacement - the biggest deficiencies on most of them tend to be I/O and storage related (compared to a standard ATX machine). Note that I haven't personally tested out many of these, but some of them do at least (on paper) outspec the raspi 4 in various ways (usually more CPU cores or (especially for Jetson) a better GPU). I'm not sure the price/performance is really there though - seriously look at the pricing of a nice SBC (like Jetson, Raspi 4 4G or 8G, OrangePi 4B, etc) + all of the other 'stuff' it requires (power supply, enclosure, SD card(s), heatsink(s), etc) to be a full DTR candidate, and then look at how cheap ATX/x86 hardware is (and what the performance deltas + software support deltas are like - especially if you're comparing new ARM vs used x86) and the x86 stuff is still usually leagues ahead (and that's before you get into how cheap desktop storage is vs an SD card on a per-GB basis, or comparing the GPUs between the two, etc). Still, the Pi Foundation claims the rpi4 is something like 30x faster than the original raspi (which was released almost 10 years ago), so if those kind of improvements over time continue, it probably won't be long until that picture changes significantly for SBCs (because I don't think Intel or AMD can make such claims, despite how fast the modern i9s and Ryzens are).

On the new Mac - I think the 'big question' is if there's anything left after M1 - sure they've got a really maxed out SOC that can reportedly sit at the table with the very lowest-spec mobile Intel chips of a few years ago, but what about for their (supposedly) pro-oriented boxes? Do they have anything that can replace a modern i9 or Ryzen (to say nothing of HEDT or Threadripper)? Or even a modern NUC? My suspicion is they're running headlong back to the PowerPC days of massively expensive, and very proprietary, hardware that's usually a good few years behind everyone else in terms of performance (but accordingly doesn't run objectionably hot or use significant amounts of power, and thus can be shoehorned into whatever bizarre enclosure they can cook up), but they probably figure most of their remaining customers couldn't care less at this point (my understanding is most of their real professional userbase dumped them years ago when they basically abandoned that segment).

I just have the RazPi 4 w/4G from the ones you mentioned. The GPU isn't too bad. I've seen a few video tests of the RazPi GPU with 2x4K monitors attached, and they managed just over 30fps. Slackware Arm has mesa with Vulkan compiled and the 3D is apparently good.

I believe the 1.5 Ghz RazPi APU can be overclocked to 2Ghz without major issue. Now the Chip is probably Broadcom's 16nM wafer fab. Apple's, by contrast is probably 5nM. That's a huge, huge difference. The M-1 should be capable of ≅4Ghz, although I'm fairly sure Apple don't push it that hard on laptops.There is some branch prediction stuff in the Arm chip, because they were caught by the Spectre bug as well, but Arm have done well to catch up over 40 years of R&D from Intel, and 30 from AMD. But they're not there yet Long kernel compiles can take up to 2 hours. More significant builds (Libreoffice suite, or firefox) can be most of a day.

What's interesting is that Arm were bought for big bucks by Nvidia recently, making the combo (Arm CPU & Nvidia GPU) the 'best of the rest' as far as APUs go. Nvidia sales must be hurting, with Intel contracting to buy AMD gpus, as AMD suddenly start trumping them in the APU stakes.

So I can foresee all the Arm & Nvidia devs suddenly getting a massive kick in the butt to deliver the new concept, and I wonder what and when that new concept will be. Nvidia's fab is currently ≥12nM, which is not at the races, but respectable enough.

Even as it stands, the RazPi 4 is fine for normal stuff. Sure, at 1.5Ghz, resizing & redrawing is a second or two slower, pcie probably is also. But several niches beckon.

Not quite true. RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computing as you said. I don't know what you refer to as cisc.
IBM has been using RISC in their commercial products for many years, More than 30. I was working for IBM as tech support with the RISC machines almost 15 years ago. I don't know in detail the updates since, but AIX runs on risc processors and for almost 20 years has been able to run Linux in VMs on their servers. In fact the hypervisor that controlled the VMs ran purely on linux.

CISC = Complex instruction set computing. IE - x86, VAX, Motorola 68000, and a few others.

And while that's 'nothing to sneeze at' - stack it up against a modern GeForce or Radeon, or even Intel's latest UHD offerings, and it becomes a lot less impressive. Of course there are ARM-based SoCs with better GPUs integrated (e.g. from Apple and Samsung), it just seems nobody is sticking those in an SBC (apart from the M1) or trying to offer a more mainstream APU out of them.

The rpi4 has a BCM2711, which is 28nm. The M1 is indeed advertised with a 'minimum feature size' of 5nm, and Apple advertises the clocks up to 3.2GHz. I don't know how Samsung/TSMC's 5nm scales, but Intel has said their 10nm does not really scale higher clocks than their 14nm process, and AMD has not gotten crazy higher clocks out of the TSMC 7nm or 12nm processes vs the previous 14nm (to say nothing of where they took 28nm).

nVidia leads marketshare in GPUs something like 10:1 against AMD, and has market valuation greater than Intel - they've posted record years recently. My guess as to why they're buying Arm is to try and make a play for embedded/mobile devices again, because that's one area they haven't had as much presence recently (not that AMD is really doing any better, apart from game consoles which have been essentially AMD's playground for two generations now).

nVidia is fabless, and their latest Ampere product is built on 8nm from Samsung. Even their last-gen stuff on 12nm was basically peerless in terms of performance though (even up against AMD's 7nm offerings).


I think the 'niche use' thing is the bigger share of RasPi deployment - using them as 'IoT' toys and such, but a real DTR they are not (yet), at least for most users methinks, but I suspect that has more to do with nobody taking a modern, flagship-tier SoC and setting it up rather than ARM itself being the issue (because, as you point out, the Broadcom chip on RasPi is pretty dated, all things considered).

The RPi400 is a perfectly capable desktop for most peoples uses, internet, music, videos, office work, etc.

(The RPi4/4GB likewise, for those that prefer a separate keyboard.)

I gather from other reading that only Samsung and Apple so far have gone to 5nm Fab...

I got prelim specs on the Apple M-1 yesterday

• 8 CPU A-72 cores
• 8 - GPU cores
• 2.6Ghz with turbo to 4.5Ghz
• 45W
• 16 core neural engine

Apple emphasize the reduction in compile times. My son gets himself a top-of-the-range company Mac every couple of years, and his current one sports an i7-9750H, but as they're boasting things like '50% faster than the best previous Macbook Pro we've ever done' he's one of the few people who can actually quantify that. No new Macbook coming his way for 6 months minimum, as they're fund raising, but maybe when they get rich again…

The bottom line is, it does seem that comparing with x86, performance per core is not as fast, but power consumption per core is way down, allowing more cores per cpu. So, as Apple's M1 won't be widely available. Arm has a mobile BIG.little combo out in the A-77 for mobiles. The big core has advanced branch prediction over the A-72, while the little cores save on the thermal penalties.

I'm looking for a desktop APU. It strikes me that the technology is there to make an Arm APU that is at the races with it's X86 competitors, but hardly superior to them. If the Raspberry Pi showed anything, it showed that Arm are catching up. But it seems to have been earmarked for mobile use only:(

I had a look at it. It's the RazPi 4, with 4G ram running @1.8Ghz - so far, so good. BUT it's in a 78/79 key keyboard:doh:
It has 1xusb-c, 2xusb-3, 1xusb-2, a nic, a mouse, a sdcard (why?) and 2xhdmi. What it doesn't have and badly needed was a SATA port. It seems Raspberry are intent on taking over where Clive Sinclair left off, which is a pity. Does anyone except me remember Clive Sinclair?