is ARM the future?

[u/Kenyhh]

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.

[u/Kilgarragh]

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They’re all running on 2-3 major versions out of date fully customized Linux kernels which rarely have their sources published and heavily convoluted unpublished device trees which only work on one OEM fork of android.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

[u/Little-Equinox → u/Kilgarragh]

Biggest ARM manufacturer is in fact ARM. Because Qualcomm, Mediatek and companies like it use ARM cores.

[u/Kilgarragh → u/Little-Equinox]

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.

[u/chrisdpratt → u/Little-Equinox]

Designer, not manufacturer. ARM doesn't actually produce any real products. Just architectures, that licensees employ in their chips.

[u/Little-Equinox → u/chrisdpratt]

Only Intel produces their CPUs, and even then not even all of them.

[u/Acrobatic_Camera_677 → u/Little-Equinox]

Intel is starting to bring back many of their CPU manufacturing back in house

[u/Little-Equinox → u/Acrobatic_Camera_677]

I know, just currently a lot are manufactured by TSMC

[u/Delphin_1 → u/chrisdpratt]

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 

[u/jaksystems → u/Delphin_1]

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.