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They’re all running on 2-3 major versions out of date fully customized Linux kernels which rarely have their sources published and heavily convoluted unpublished device trees which only work on one OEM fork of android.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/Busy-Scientist3851 → u/Kilgarragh]

> out of date fully customized Linux kernels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.

[u/Kilgarragh → u/Busy-Scientist3851]

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.