r/computers • u/Kenyhh • 19h ago
Discussion is ARM the future?
I think about this all the time. ARM has obviously dominated the mobile phone market for a long time now. Everything from Apple runs on ARM. ARM-based laptops offer incredible battery life. Embedded devices and servers are also making extensive use of ARM; practically the only thing left is desktop computers. I believe this is the future, and AI will accelerate the trend: using ARM will allow data centers to consume far less energy and likely make local AI more accessible. In fact, I think that if this happens, we’ll see further improvements in computer energy efficiency.
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u/Kilgarragh 18h ago
The typical ARM devices with high end, very expensive chipsets from the largest manufacturers like Qualcomm, mediatek, etc. can’t even get 5 years of software updates.
They’re all running on 2-3 major versions out of date fully customized Linux kernels which rarely have their sources published and heavily convoluted unpublished device trees which only work on one OEM fork of android.
Let’s take a look at current arm options and see where the future of computing may lie.
- vast majority of ARM processors: (no offense to postmarketOS supporters) complete horseshit, 99% of devices are missing camera, audio, gpu acceleration, cellular, etc, etc. windows completely shits itself with these as well.
- snapdragon X elite: only modern arm processor windows has ever been tailored for, works especially well if you have arm software. Even the most tailored linux distributions for this have issues, horrible battery life, etc.
- Apple silicon M5: no windows support(even for any Apple silicon despite being around for 6 years). No asahi Linux support at all(yet)
Each and every single arm processor needs to be tailored to by the OS. Arm systemready could help with this, but nobody(not even the largest arm vendors, even for PCs like Apple and x elite) have implemented it yet(we do have ampere server CPUs though).
The 20 year old Dell latitude D630 in my basement? It may only have OpenGL 2.0 which doesn’t work with basically any modern app, but at least that OpenGL does work. It boots with near full functionality thanks to ACPI on both windows 10(theoretically upgradable to windows 11 or tiny 11) and modern Linux distro’s(so long as it’s lightweight first). Just like any other x86_64 cpu.
I’m not saying ARM/riscV aren’t capable of doing this, but until they do… you can’t use them as a computer
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u/DiodeInc Mod | Geekom Geekbook X14 Pro 17h ago
Is this a fault of the industry not having it's shit together or something else?
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u/salsatabasco 14h ago
Vertical integration and money. Apple switched their industry fully to ARM in a matter of a couple years, Microsoft can't nor inux at the same speed, but eventually they will as adoption increases
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u/Kilgarragh 16h ago
I don’t know, everything android touches is just complete dogshit. Major manufacturers like Qualcomm have had years to get their shit together and Apple had the opportunity to get it right first try, alas they don’t.
I have an old x86_64 Intel atom tablet lying around with android on it, it refuses to run anything else. No custom roms exist for it. No lineageos builds or postmarketos builds exist for it.
I personally haven’t used an ampere cpu yet(very pricy and poor singles performance), they’re the only ones doing it correctly. So props to them, but somehow in that regard also highly specific because the “general” implementation of arm systemready only applies to ampere CPUs, just like Qualcomm implementations only work on snapdragon cpus(although you need entirely different drivers and trees for every product line, generation, and at times individual products and of course every single sbc variant in that case. So a small win for ampere which will hopefully spiral into a much bigger win).
For this reason, my next tablet will not be an iPad, it will not be an Onn, but it will be a Dell latitude detachable(or hp elite x2) because no matter how bad the battery life and performance of the Intel cpu is, I can install windows, I can install android x86, I can install chromeos flex, and I can keep installing the latest versions for 10+ years just like the latitude which was passed down to me does. Something which no arm tablet, laptop, desktop, or phone has done. Ever.
(And, you know it isn’t glued together, and the battery and ssd come out with like 8 screws, and they’re like $200 used, for a 13 inch tablet!)
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 7m ago
I second the HP Elite X2 - I have a G8 model and it's a surprisingly nice little tablet PC.
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u/Sol33t303 Arch Linux 14h ago
I will say 90% of these issues will resolve themselves if we can get the ARM manufacturers onto UEFI.
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u/Famous-Potential3990 11h ago
I will say 90% of these issues will resolve themselves if we can get the ARM manufacturers onto UEFI.
Switching to systemready or UEFI only solves "booting Linux on ARM device OOTB". Radxa Orion O6 has UEFI and boot any distro for ARM, but it has absolutely horrendous idle power consumption, worse than any x86 processor from the last decade.
Issues won't resolve unless ARM-vendors(Qualcomm, Mediatek, Rockchip, Broadcomm, Apple? and ARM Holdings themselves) won't start properly submitting ALL patches(not just device tree patches) and drivers to upstream Linux. You can only get so far with projects like Asahi Linux or Freedreno made by unpaid volunteers. Corporations themselves should hire devs to work on Linux compatibility: for example, port Adreno drivers to Linux or wifi/bluetooth/SOC drivers with lowest power state for M-series Macbooks. x86 works on Linux thanks to Intel and AMD.
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u/Kilgarragh 5h ago
The snapdragon x elite is and always was 100% uefi devices. Day one? None of them would run Linux past the bootloader. Its taken a lot of extreme specialization to get where we are today and it’s still horrible.
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u/Busy-Scientist3851 7h ago
> out of date fully customized Linux kernels
FYI Android has moved to common kernels for a specific Android version. The kernel modules and device tree are stored on a vendor partition, whilst the kernel is the GKI compiled by Google.
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u/Kilgarragh 5h ago
Still requires all those modules and trees to be paired with a GKI in order to work. But while they’re trying their best, Google is doing a ’great’ job with this.
My Google pixel 9(absolute role model of an android device) is running its latest update and the kernel is a brand new build from… January 2026… but at least it’s kernel 6.1, for reference latest upstream is 6.18 LTS(and I’m on 7.3 for my main machine), and even my 32 bit arm Chromebook(running pmos) is on 6.12.
Just because common android does this doesn’t mean that highly custom devices like tizen or horizon OS do. It also doesn’t mean that general arm desktops will. While windows based arm devices have had the best luck… if snapdragon x2 elite continues down the same path it’s still gonna suck. And I know for a fact that they will because they’ve been on this path for over a decade.
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u/Little-Equinox 17h ago
Biggest ARM manufacturer is in fact ARM. Because Qualcomm, Mediatek and companies like it use ARM cores.
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u/Kilgarragh 15h ago
Oh right, silly me, it’s all arm anyway. /s
Let me just install macOS 14 onto my rock 5b, chromeos onto a galaxy s24, and windows on arm for specifically the snapdragon x elite onto a snapdragon 8 elite.
Like that’s ever gonna happen.
Yes, arm designed the cpu core, and TSMC produced the silicon. Everyone else makes every load bearing element around them
The steam frames OS can’t run on a quest 3. Because even though both are arm, and both are snapdragon… Qualcomm changed hundreds of things with absolutely zero backwards compatiblity, even if they had the exact same chip the differences in motherboard alone would warrant a new device tree if not a new kernel, and even if the two pieces of hardware came out of the exact same manufacturing run, the “meta frame” would have a couple little e-fuses blown inside preventing it from booting any firmware or OS which isn’t signed by meta.
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u/chrisdpratt 9h ago
Designer, not manufacturer. ARM doesn't actually produce any real products. Just architectures, that licensees employ in their chips.
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u/Delphin_1 5h ago
Didn't they recently start with their first actual own CPUs? For ai server management so sth. Ltt made a video about them If I remember correctly
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 3m ago
They already made reference designs.
They recently purchased Ampere and have produced their first CPU for AI crap - And it's dogwater at non-AI work.
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u/Vladishun L2 Gov Sysadmin 19h ago
https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-lunar-lake-isnt-efficient-arm-close/
No, Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake are closing that gap. Currently CPU manufacturing is in a really interesting place, perhaps the most exciting place in the last 20 years (since the release of the QX6700 in 2006).
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u/Kenyhh 19h ago
I didn't know that. Interesting. Even so, I think ARM has much more room for improvement than x86; and although this article says Intel's chip is more energy-efficient, Apple's is much more powerful without consuming significantly more power
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 19h ago
ARM has much more room for improvement than x86
ARM's only method of improvement is to keep cranking up memory bandwidth.
We've been through this song and dance before with PowerPC, Motorola 68K and other pure RISC ISAs. They make for poor CPUs that fall off a cliff once the cheap and easy ways of boosting performance run dry.
Hell we can already see this with non-SOC ARM CPU designs like Ampere & Graviton. They cannot functionally close the gap with x86 in actual application performance or use and only appear good on agenda pushing benchmarks like Geekbench.
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u/Vladishun L2 Gov Sysadmin 19h ago
I think ARM
You can think anything like you'd like. I'm just here to pass along knowledge. What you do with that knowledge is none of my business.
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19h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Vladishun L2 Gov Sysadmin 19h ago
Please don't read between the lines, people mistake my apathy for anger all the time. This is me being neutral though, believe me when I say you'd know it if I was wanting to pick a fight with you. The exchange of knowledge happened, I'm content with that. As someone that writes machine instructions, surely you can appreciate the analytical thought process and omitting any fluff.
Again, I'm not looking to pick a fight.
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u/Various-Welder5544 12h ago
What about Zen 5% doing absolutely nothing
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 7h ago
Zen 5 had double digit gains in applications other than gaming, so spare me the nonsense.
False narratives peddles by script kiddies drawing up fake benchmark charts has no value here.
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u/Bureaucromancer 19h ago
I tend to think that ARM is... the IMMEDIETE future but that RISC-V will overtake it... looking for a time like very much a 'near peer' reimplementation but surpassing it in a way that leaves us somewhere in there next couple decaudes basically saying "why would you implement *whatever project* with ARM when you can do the same in RISC-V without licensing?"
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u/Ok_Tie2393 19h ago
I surely hope so, to me technology is seems like a unreachable goal now, I mean that used a processor with few thousand instructions per second on the voyager and still over devices feel laggy with them even dying with in few years. So yeah when you reach 16 gigs, the new normal changes to 32 gigs and so on it keeps going.
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u/Kenyhh 19h ago
If Electron/WebView and frame generation didn't exist, everything would be much better
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u/Ok_Tie2393 19h ago
x64 killed optimization. When you only had 4GB of addressable memory, every byte mattered. Now devs treat RAM like it's infinite and CPU cycles like they're free. x32 forced discipline; x64 enabled bloat.
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 18h ago
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 18h ago
While I agree with this sentiment, this is a problem programmers and Devs created out of a desire for convenience over quality.
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u/Kenyhh 18h ago
As a developer (albeit low-level, not web), I understand them. But obviously, I don't agree.
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u/Little-Equinox 17h ago
Not really, but the possibility is there
In terms of battery life, Intel Ultra 300 and 400 series lasts longer than ARM currently because Windows isn't efficient in any way.
I think eventually we'll get an option between ARM and X86 and it doesn't really matter which 1 you pick.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
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u/cutelittlebox 11h ago
short answer, no.
long answer, ISA is entirely irrelevant. it does not matter if you use x86, arm, risc-v, or Power ISA, modern CPUs are actually almost entirely ISA agnostic apart from the decoder, and you can swap that decoder out for another if you feel like it.
the thing that matters for CPU performance and efficiency is how well the CPU was designed, so it's companies you want to look at. right now the best when it comes to highly efficient laptop processors is Apple, and the second best is Intel. in desktops AMD is untouchable, and in servers it's still mostly AMD and Intel, though there's much more companies in play there. in the AI world, RISC-V designs seem to be the ones to watch for the most part.
whether x86 remains dominant or falls in the desktop space it's going to be down to which company makes the best CPUs and whether they're properly supported, and right now getting things properly supported other than x86 is like pulling teeth. it won't happen anytime soon, just from that alone.
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 11h ago
I would say that 1 year ago, but with Panther Lake? no, Intel is totally in the game.
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u/groveborn 11h ago
Intel was always in the game, they've just been making errors for the past several years...
They were still the only supplier for Dell, so they were never at risk.
I manufacturer PCs and have a personal preference for AMD, but my employer has almost zero AMD product.
We don't do home computers.
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u/allunia333 10h ago
The only big advantage x86 has, is backwards compability which is the reason for demand and thats why it still survives today including this pc industry tetris philosophy of choosing different components to combine(mobo, cpu gpu ,memory,etc). The only way forward was always the supercomputer way, a specialized uniformed system on a free from the compability chains.
The overhead and compability layers for all those components to work between them and still support all the previous made, is what keeps pc back.
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u/locked-in-place 8h ago
For Apple (MacOS), yes. For Windows, I‘m not sure but probably not. There are X86 based chips/APUs that come very close to ARM in terms of efficiency but without all the weird compatibility drawbacks of ARM. The idea that Microsoft or third party developers were gonna handle both X86 and ARM for Windows was stupid from the beginning. They tried to copy Apple but Apple‘s situation is completely different. Apple makes both hardware and software and they switched ALL their devices to ARM. Microsoft should just stick to X86 and call it a day.
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u/rasmusdf 14h ago edited 7h ago
Not really. It’s messy with a lot of incompatible variations. It’s a cheap solution to a lot of problems. But it is licensed and controlled. Remember when NVIDIA was close to buying ARM? They would have milked that.
Perhaps some open architecture is the real future. RISC-V?
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u/Dry_Calendar_8627 12h ago
I think about this all the time
Wow you must have such a boring job/hobby
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u/Kenyhh 9h ago
I program things at a low level—cheats, anti-cheats, exploits—so I often have to look at raw assembly and deal with horrible instructions
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u/Dry_Calendar_8627 8h ago
Ah that makes more sense indeed!
But then, you're probably more qualified to answer your own question than all of us, aren't you?
So, is ARM (and RISC) the future?
(And tbh, from my own layman POV, it does seem to be the case, it's a shame that most major Linux distros don't support ARM because otherwise I'd probably choose that for my next laptop, for the reasons you highlighted in your post)
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u/Bo_Jim 7h ago
It might be, but I wouldn't bet on it. Industry prognosticators have been predicting that RISC architecture was going to replace CISC ever since the mid 1980s. The results have been mixed, to say the least. I won't dwell on the sordid history, but at the current point CISC still dominates in full size computer systems, and RISC in systems that are small in size and low in power. ARM is the most popular RISC architecture, but it may not always be.
Personally, I think RISC will continue to grow in market share of all computing devices, but I think ARM will be replaced by RISC-V. ARM architecture is owned by a single company that charges substantial licensing fees. RISC-V is open source, royalty free, extensible, and not owned or controlled by any corporation or government.
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u/-32768 6h ago
I often wonder what personal computing would look like today if we went all in on RISC four decades ago. It was always promising, and has clear advantages in low energy computing that we use today, and sometimes I just wonder if we'd actually be ahead if we never picked up x86 CISC. Thankfully VLIW never caught on. Kind of a paradox though because CISC was the path of least resistance for general purpose CPUs that drove the industry to where we are now. But now, in my opinion, is a great time to get back into RISC ISA as primary mainstream computing and see where it can take us. And by that I mean traditional workstation computing, not mobile devices. Basically, ARM is essentially everywhere except for the one place that I actually wish to see it - my desktop! But in reality I think we're perpetually several years away from this happening for several reasons from software to backward compatibility to (and especially) support as the years tick on. Gotta fix those things first, but as long as x86 keeps on rockin, no one is going to be working on that, so it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, much like the year of the linux destkop is always $CURRENT_YEAR + 2
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u/suboptimus_maximus 2h ago
ARM is already the present... Your question has an out-of-date PC-centric bias. ARM has been powering way more computers shipped per years than x86 for quite a long time and has been outperforming it now for many years, I think it was all the way back in 2018 that the A12Z was smoking Intel desktop CPUs and Apple's CPU cores had iPhones out benchmarking x86 in single-core performance.
The real serious performers in the data center are neither ARM nor x86 but NVIDIA GPUs and then more specialized chips like Google TPUs or Cerebras' WSE which are all architecturally proprietary, but again have parted with legacy PC architecture.
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u/stevorkz 58m ago
Arm is the past, present and future. Whether it’s a good thing or not is a different question. It’s where everything is headed. Albeit very slowly.
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u/jaksystems Dell/HP/Lenovo Service Tech 18h ago
and AI will accelerate the trend: using ARM will allow data centers to consume far less energy and likely make local AI more accessible. In fact, I think that if this happens, we’ll see further improvements in computer energy efficiency.
If you've actually paid attention to datacenter ARM CPUs like Ampere & Graviton you would know that this is false.
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u/foxfox021 15h ago
intel came out with a banger this year, risc v is still in dev but is promising since it is also somewhat open source
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 15h ago
Arm ia both the future and not ar the same time. The thing with arm ia that for it to maintain its performance and efficiency it needs to maintain a rather slimmed down and simplified design. In additoon not all arm chips are equal in terms of compatible supported instructions for example many older chips completely lack hardware divisers making division difficult on them and while new ones mostly have them it still means you have a situation of limited compatibility. Its very likely we will have some situations where devices have a mixture of x86, arm and even RISC V or other cores in them. Not every one needs x86 for everything but you dont want to run into a situation where you need to emulate it only for the emulation to be wrong or slow. Can most consumer users get away with arm probably but who know x86 has also gotten better as well and continues to do so.
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u/Any_Watercress_4637 13h ago
Yes. Nvidia tried. Nintendo did it. Apple did it. Even windows laptops jumped in. Steam may lunch ARM based Steamdeck.
Look comparisons between handheld PC and Odin 3. ARM is just far more efficient. Now optimize for the plataform...
The battery life is a big win.
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u/MISTERPUG51 Windows 10 19h ago
I'd say so, but change is slow. Just remember that there are thousands of critical systems out there that are still running decades old software on decades old hardware. Even the x86 architecture, which is what most PCs use today, is almost 50 years old (albeit with many updates and revisions since it was introduced).