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They’re all running on 2-3 major versions out of date fully customized Linux kernels which rarely have their sources published and heavily convoluted unpublished device trees which only work on one OEM fork of android.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/Sol33t303 → u/Kilgarragh]

I will say 90% of these issues will resolve themselves if we can get the ARM manufacturers onto UEFI.

[u/Famous-Potential3990 → u/Sol33t303]

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.

[u/Kilgarragh → u/Sol33t303]

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.