Despite being a completely closed platform, ironically Apple M-series chips will probably end up being the best supported hardware on Linux compared to other ARM SoCs.
Apples SOC is one of the most open of the ARM chips out there, you might think it is a closed platform but that is in fact quite wrong. Things like once the boot manager hands over to your kernel only your kernel code is running there is no device manager engine like on intel/amd systems with full access to the system or a ring level below your kernel running the UEFI etc.
Due to the sheer marketshare and people following the effort. Mainline Linux for Snapdragon devices is there for some devices like the 835 and very smooth sailing as I've found out. And Alwinner devices support is really good under Linux Sunxi, except for the propietary things like video acceleration, however they are mostly on cheap chinese devices and enthusiast single board computers so they are a way less sexy target
The ARM Linux port was started in 1994, when Linux only ran on i386 (before MIPS, Alpha etc. support). The original port was a single-handed effort by Russell King in his spare time while he was an undergraduate at Southampton University, and first booted on his Acorn Archimedes A5000. I think the first available ARM release was based on Linux 1.1.59 (from Oct 1994), and was released during 1995. A few years previously Russell has been in my secondary school computer club, where he neatly out-coded me and everyone else I knew by a mile. More details can be found at "The History of ARM Linux".
@@DavidAspden I did a bit of excavation and although the ARM port first booted in 1994, it didn't start getting merged into mainline Linux in earnest until Jan 1998 with Linux 2.1.80 (when arch/arm appeared in the tree), although some preparatory patches had already been merged before then.
I love my M1 MacBook and I love Linux. I can't wait for Linux to have full GPU acceleration on Apple hardware, it'll become my daily driver. I wonder if Linus using Asahi will in any way add momentum to the Linux on Apple Silicon initiative - perhaps drawing interest (and assistance in the project) from Apple. Probably not, but I need hope, haha. I couldn't imagine a better portable environment to develop on. Crazy long battery life, unreal CPU performance, incredible screen, best track pad in the industry _and_ full fat Linux. Running containers natively and having access to the Vulkan API.
Probably not from apple lol, that would be a conflict of interest, but surely from other projects.......surely........hopefully.......probably........maybe
@@fuseteam I checked out the progress on the GPU driver and the creator estimates they will have a working driver capable of rendering a desktop environment by the end of the year. Pretty incredible progress and the whole reverse engineering journey is extremely fascinating - worth checking out if you're curious about systems programming
@@DavidAlsh And depending on the hardware quirks getting the GPU drivers stable may or may not take a long time. For example, the GPU driver for intel GPUs is still a bit unstable even after over a decade of work and some level of support by intel engineers working on it. The issue seems to be that the intel GPU locks for some input and the driver needs to do all kind of tricks to avoid the hardware from locking up. If Apple GPU has similar problems, creating a working stable driver will be an enormous effort. If Apple hardware is actually good, then creating reverse engineered GPU driver will be much easier.
@@MikkoRantalainen that's really great insight. I'm not knowledgeable in driver development or reverse engineering hardware to create drivers so that really helped add to my understanding of the challenges
It was no coincidence that ARM processors were installed in mobile phones and Ipads and so on. The reason is simply low power consumption and limited battery capacity. I've been using the Paspberry pi 4 as a desktop PC for exactly 3 years. Power consumption 3W idle 5W full load at 2Ghz clocking with oversized passive cooling at 35°C. The future belongs to ARM processors with Linux operating system. This is not only efficient but also environmentally friendly. This would not be possible without the brilliant Linus Benedict Torvalds.
@Daniel Rumbacher should be a lot simpler for people to get HW accretion support on apple silicon for these things due to the ability to lift macOS up into M1N1 (vm like layer) and track exactly how it talks to any other bit of the system without macOS bothering/detective it is being snooped on.
@Daniel Rumbacher The solution Asahi Linux is taking is to not attempt to replace the proprietary firmware. inserted they pull this firmware during install time: how boot works means that when the pre-boot hands over to your kernel literally nothing is started up apart from a single e-core for your kernel. It is your responsibility to start up any part of the SOC you like and provide it with the firmware blob (this is great as you can pin the firmware version to your kernel even if someone has macOS installed using more uptodate firmwares this does not effect Linus at all). Then when up update your linux install to a version that wants newer firmware it can pull those blobs it wants. This is a key features of these chips! Apple provide fully legal way to pull down the firmware during first install. Apple really does not block free software, they are the main developers behind massive open source projects like LLVM. There have also made key changes to pre-boot and boot loader signing that have no use case for apple but made things much simpler and easier for the linux on M1 team. It is clear apple have no issue with this project and most likly like it quite a lot to put engineering time into making things better, they also keep in putting useful negates of info into the Darwin kernel (the open source part of macOS) that have helps the devs on this platform. The image that apple Is apposed to open source is just utterly wrong, vast amounts of the work apple does depends on it and they contribute back to the community a lot.
@Daniel Rumbacher , @matthaus woolard: I agree with you that hardware acceleration for graphics and videos is essential for these applications. There are no doubts in my mind about that. However, manufacturers secrecy about their drivers and other factors are definitely hindering the needed advances that we are all craving as a community. A potential solution to this problem is offering a huge number of specialized cores in the processor itself. This is a kind of a trend nowadays, especially in AMD's APUs. GPUs embedded in APUs would not be exactly the same as specialized cores, though. They could be directly accessed by a program without using shaders or drivers. High level programming languages are not quite prepared for this, except one: Go. Go has an intrinsic generic assembly that can be further compiled for efficiency in a given architecture. So instead of a low level driver, the programmer would have a library that would use the resource if it exists. It would be desirable to have a hardware scheduler to distribute the tasks back and forth the given specialized cores. This would be potentially highly efficient and would eliminate the need of graphics cards for most applications requiring them. The big problem with graphics cards is their high energy consumption and the communication bottleneck by needing to transfer the whole contents through an external bus. With specialized cores one would eliminate the need of graphics cards internal memory, communication (bus) bottlenecks, drivers and shaders, transferring these problems to a highly parallel and highly efficient managing hardware to transfer the tasks back and forth the specialized cores. Another advantage of specialized cores is that they could be conceived in a standardized way. Thus, future versions could be merely extensions (more cores, for examples). As I said, APUs are already slowly going in that way. It would be a great thing if ARM (and other processors, such as RISC-V) started to do the same.
Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be fully implemented on Apple silicon. Apple silicon is levels better than Intel and AMD offering especially with regards to performance efficiency which is essential for laptops
My bet is that it will take A LOOONG time for them to reverse-engineer FULL hardware support for M2 into Apple's secretive proprietary world. You think Apple will allow them to have Linux running better on a Mac than MacOX?
@@hstrinzel it is no more secretive than any other platform to be fair, and given some of the hardware features such as being able to lift macOS fully into a very light weight VM (M1N1) they are able to sniff what it is doing very easily. This is a much simpler project than trying to reverse engineers most other hardware out there. The other benefit they have is that each of the added SOC features tends to be connected to its own little arm core that they can load the firmware (apple provide at install time). This exposes a high level interface to the CPU. So they do not need to write a low level display controler firmware that talks DisplayPort and handles display port handshakes as that is all done by the display controler cpu and firmware provided by apple all they need to do is see what remove function calls macSO sends to it and gets back from it and implement that interface in linux. (more or less a header file and some of that is even in the open source Darwin kernel that they can read over to help them figure these things out).
what would give better fps on linux steam with x86 games running with proton. an m1 macbook air with asahi, or with an amd ryzen 7 3700u or 5700u? the example game i like to inquire for is no mans sky on playable settings at 900p. but if you have any idea of how those two hardware compare in general for gaming that would appreciated.
@@jangofet555 Currently Asahi linux doe snot have GPU drivers and even when it does the GPU drivers it will get first are OpenGL once as this is much easier to developer. There is a team working on VK drivers but this will be be the TBDR subset of VK (not the set of VK apis that PC games expect and not what proton expects). Many people misunderstand VK it is not a single api it is more of a collection of seperate apis and depending not the hardware you have you implement the selection of features that match that hardware (you do not attempt to emulate other hardware that is againts the concept of VK). Apples GPUs are close to those by PowerVK and are TBDR gpus this means they have quite a different VK feature set to the TBIR gpus made by AMD/NVidia and Intel so PC games (and proton) that are coded for VK are in fact not coded for generic VK they are coded for TBIR PC VK subset of apis. In summary playing an un-modfied PC game on these machines will not run very well as if someone puts a shim in to support the cpus these games expect to be present it will be a shim with a load of nasty overhead.
I've owned a MBA M1 for 1,5 years now and while I certainly have my issues with Apple, it's an incredibly impressive laptop and Rosetta works very well. Can't wait for Asahi to be developed enough for me to switch!
@@1MinuteFlipDoc running x86 windows is costly as translating the kernel live has a big perf impact. Better to run ARM64 windows with x86 translation embedded (but MS translation is not perfect). Apple this year did expose their Rosseta2 to linux VM guests (and based on the license could also be used by Asahi linux when running on apple hardware).
@@1MinuteFlipDoc I have the pro expensive annual Parallels subscription running on the maxed out M1 pro never in my life I struggled this much with a piece of software I love it yet hate it in the same time I could rant for hours about my experience (I mainly do Software engineering and Penetration testing/Red Teaming) in my device also had to do some Data Science (worked phenomenally) during my Software engineering work I struggled a lot cuz I had to go thru some hardware specific code (no emulation will help you there as of today for variety of reasons) also, had to do some Ruby (with Jykell and that was such a pain in the ass that's uncalled for) but the thing I had to struggle with the most is working with certain tool for my job and while I was pentesting a target I had to install certain lib problem is many of tools in the industry are not compiled with ARM on mind that was a struggle as I come from a Software engineering (worked as a Full stack dev and Data science stuff) it's easier for me than the majority of people in the tech industry to modify code on the fly without breaking their flow while they are analyzing a target so I would not recommend M1 for any pentesters, except the main reason why I bought them: Mobile Penetration Testing And bug bounty hunting .. if that's something you don't do at the moment skip the whole M series heck all Macbooks
There are a few reasons why Asahi linux fits the needs for this type of development - it's not just working but it is *very* competitive for compile times. Another important piece would be the intended use case - Asahi isn't there yet for what "the average consumer" would look for yet such as multimedia. This will take some time. I adore my Pinebook Pro for basic tasks and I do look forward to a more capable SoC plugged into it (a few other h-w improvements would be welcomed especially around power delivery). And even when that moment comes to be a reality, I would imagine the M1 SoC to still be more capable in raw computational performance. With that said - more affordable and more capable ARM SoC are on the horizon. Being excited as of what rk3558 SBCs can bring to the table for enabling the infrastructure is an understatement. Distro maintainers and community members will gain a sizeable upgrade without resorting to devices that are either very expensive + specialized (Honeycomb?) or forced into Apple silicon exclusively (the performance comes with quite a few strings attached - especially for long term support). Either way, aarch64 landscape outlook looks very good compared to just 3 years ago. The options are multiplying and reaching the hands of users and developers alike 😁 Note: Startup on arm devices is still *very* messy unfortunately (cough, uboot, cough). Projects like tow-boot are amazing at removing some of the initial hurdles preventing interested community members at even getting a distro started up on the board of their choice.
As you pointed out, Apple has been doing this for years. They have fine tuned it from all the way back to the A4 chip, iPhone 5, I believe. We are now up to M1, which is essentially an A14x with a bit more functionality. It could take awhile for others to catch up. I love my Mac for Web Development, as well as Android Studio and Xcode. Homebrew works quite well for package management. For my use case, MacOS provides for all my dev needs. YMMV
The M series architecture is not a derivation of the A series chipsets. It’s from a completely different ARM architecture that Steve Jobs purchased the rights to before he passed away. This is Job’s masterpiece. Not something he paid TI for. Hence he hired a bunch of ARM systems engineers and TI guys and had Apple build a plant in Texas near TI so they could scalp TI engineers. This is Steve still showing the tech industry who the boss is, even from the grave.
Long story short we users, customers definitely want these computing devices maintained, patched as long as possible independently of any vendor. At least, I think that was the point that the prior post was to make.
@@StormBurnX most laptop brands drop support for (at the OEM level) very quickly after release, they just depend on MS supporting things but stuff like firmware updates typically last for less than a few years if that. Based on apple's history with macOS we can easily expect 10 years of security updates for these devices (firmware and os).. might not get new os features for all of those 10 years but sec updates is what matters.
@@hishnash can confirm from personal experience getting various updates 7+ years after purchasing a macbook air over a decade ago, which is nice, but OP seems to complain it's not enough which is why I was curious what "better" brand they were trying to imply exists, otherwise they're just complaining for the sake of complaining it seems
@@StormBurnX the real nice factor is getting firmware updates as well not just os updates. So many OEMs just do not bother at all in the laptop (and desktop space).
I have an M1 MacBook Air and I have to say that it’s my favorite system. I’m waiting for Asahi to become fully stable and then I will need to determine the space trade off as far as getting it ready. I have not partitioned or dual booted in a very long time and that’s the one thing that makes me very nervous, especially because of the rather untraditional installation one will have to go through for this. My hope is that eventually we can do what we do with all other systems and boot from a USB and maybe even run in live mode before committing. I realize given Apple’s locked down nature, that such a wish may be our in the sky, but hey, one can dream right? I’m also looking forward to seeing Linux running on these pieces that are powered by the QUALCOMM snapdragon.
My current main portable is a Nokia T20 Android tablet, so yes I would love to see more laptops around $500, or less with ARM CPU's with open firmware so we can install whatever Linux distro we want that has an ARM build. Same for desktop motherboards with good ARM chips, and expansion, it's been done before in the past with the Arcon Archimedes machines, and it can be done again.
I am a person who has dreamed of a commercial computer/notebook using ARM architecture for years. I see that the biggest problem is the lack of industry standardization. You find several development boards using ARM like RaspberryPI. However, it is necessary to standardize a type of SOCKET for the ARM processor and a standard motherboard configuration. Unlike the x86 market that only has two manufacturers, ARM processors have several. No one is going to invest, at this first moment, in a motherboard that forces them to be tied to a single manufacturer. A motherboard that supports several different models and manufacturers is the best solution.
Around the end of 2010 I came to the conclusion that ARM was the future and that x86 had run it's course. As you have stated ( pleaded) we need ARM CPUs that we can buy the same as we buy AMD or Intel ones. Along with the motherboards for them, just as there are for AMD and Intel. I assume that what we are asking for is ARM hardware parity with x86.
The thing with arm and part of the revolutiomn it brings, is that there _is_ no standalone cpu. The M1 tauted by linus is an SoC, all pf them are. It's a 'system on a chip' it contains, in the case of the m1; the cpu, the gpu and the ram on a single chip which improves its performances drastically but an SoC can also contain other processing units like a video processing unit, an image processing unit, a neural processing unit. and it still requires a motherboard. Interesting enough apple's m1 even contains an ssd controller so that raw memory modules are used as a storage device SoC _could_ potentially be expandable with extra memory, 'external' gpus and what not but that remains to be seen. But basically wat we're asking is to renew the computer build to be more modern with ARM SoC's rather than the legacy x86 CPUs, which has power(both computational and battery) benefits, see the M1 ;)
A love how people comment (in generally, not only in the tech space) how "we need" and "we want" something just because they are just want Marketing and production works in a specific way. The things that are created are the things that "we need" and "we want". The truth is that most people don't give a single shit about if their devices will user ARM, X86, RISCV, MIPS or whatever! Hell, most people don't even know what these stuff is. Most people just understand and care about performance, battery life, features and cost. Until ARM (or anyone else) can offer something that will set it apart, the average consumer won't care. And unfortunately, unless it can excel in 2-3 sectors, if it's just 1 sector, that 1 sector needs to be performance because the average normie user just gets "craaaazyyy" about performance. I don't say that to say something bad about you or to offend you. I just wanted to point out that realization that I see more and more often as time goes. And again, it's a phenomenon that happens in every space. We humans (and I'm putting myself inside, so you don't call me a hypocrite) do so much self-projecting without even realize it, lol!
As a LinuxMint user and a RedHat aspirant myself, my opinion is that, for manufactures (not Apple) to make more affordable Arm based PCs and Linux machines, more people must start using Linux based OS. And to make Linux to Appeal to the masses, more professional useful Softwares must be developed or made compatible in Linux OS.
I would love to see an Arm setup where the RAM and GPU aren't completely "sealed" within the SoC as they are in Apple machines. From a "freedom" standpoint, Apple's design (beyond its excellent arm architecture) is extremely troubling to me because it places Apple Corporation in a stranglehold position vis-a-vis consumers who need a tiny bit more RAM or SSD space. The entire structure feels extremely anti-competitive - like a hardware "black box" on your lap, which is antithetical to Linux and downright ironic as far as the free software movement is concerned.
@@TFirsty I don't disagree, but I lament the fact that our computers are at best turning into sealed devices akin to gaming consoles, and at worst into engineering duplicates of cellphones. Considering what the NSA has done with cellphone technology in placing the entire population under surveillance, this does not bode well for anyone interested in using technological tools to promote critical thought or dissent. This is especially true for journalists and human rights activists around the world. I find all of this quite alarming, to be honest.
@@TFirsty This isn't really true at all. SoCs are good for power efficiency reasons but they don't really contribute to performance at all. Why do you think AMD use chiplets for both CPUs and GPUs? Because they give higher performance and are cheaper and easier to manufacture. Even Apple use two processor chips to make the M1 Ultra. There is actually a type of processor called a SoP (System on Package). All the Ryzen 7000 are SoPs as they have a chipset, GPU, CPU, and memory controller on the same package; this design type if compatible with chiplets as some components are in a separate chiplet but they all wire into the same substrate or package. M1 Ultra is also a SoP as are all M1 products. As for SSDs the actual storage chips that hold the data can't be part of the SoC anyway, as seen in the Apple devices. Only the controller is part of the SoC and it supports multiple sizes of storage, Apple just choose to restrict what you can do with it because it benefits them to make devices non-upgradable. With some firmware updates they could make the M1 Ultra support upgradable storage modules quite easily, although these upgrade modules would have to be supported by the firmware and would be proprietary. It would be almost trivial for Apple to redesign the Macbook Pros using the same up-gradable modules instead of soldered on chips. SoCs are also great for low power and cost devices like smartphones where performance isn't required. Even then you can make variants with up-gradable storage and sometimes RAM as well.
@@TFirsty Your literally talking about Intel as an example of performance coming with efficiency when they are the least efficient compared to AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm. Sure efficiency and performance can go together but it's really not that simple. Just look at RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 for an example. Nobody actually puts their main DDR memory on the same chip as their processing in high performance systems. Even Apple M1 dosen't do this. It's on the same package not in the same chip, so you have a misunderstanding of what an SoC is here compared to an SoP. I actually agree that putting memory on the same package can improve performance but I doubt it will be the only viable solution for quite a while. However the only things which substantially benefit from this approach are devices which use HBM such as GPUs and FPGAs as they actually make use of the better connection between processor and memory that MCM allows. This is partly because the pace of modern processors outstripped RAM decades ago. That's why we have cache. Even putting RAM on the same package isn't fast enough to remove the need for cache and you can see this with M1 itself. Anyway all that aside even with SoPs that have integrated RAM you could always put the SoP on a separate processor card or mainboard that can be upgraded independently of storage and other hardware like IO ports, keyboard and screens. You can actually see this with the MNT Reform - although that design is far from ideal. The framework also has a swappable motherboard allowing upgrade to 12th gen processors from the original 11th gen without needing to replace the other parts. The only sustainable computer industry is one that promotes reuse of existing laptops and other products with new internals.
I just want a slim laptop with Snapdragon Elite X and Linux (with graphics etc everything running) and that's it. Really. It would be good enough for me for so many years.
Next up: we want RISC V laptops. Ones that can be verified from start to finish with a simple BIOS that can hand off to open source software. In case people hadn't realised yet (it can some as a shock) - the number of operating systems that sit UNDER linux/windows. I lost count of the total.. but here's some: the hypervisor, UEFI, SMM, Intel's management engine (ME) - all of these are large enough to be operating systems... and there are more still. You have NO idea how much software is running sneakily on your PC even if you think you are running Linux - it's encrypted, updated remotely... and all of it is being repurposed for 1) the manufacturer 2) the state three letter agencies. In others words: part of your machine is setup as an enclave ready for state snooping or tax, DRM etc. And all of it full of code that is rarely examined and full of security holes. UEFI for example was a disaster - the BIOS boot process was a perfect example of something that needed to be as simple as possible. But Intel had its agenda and built UEFI - an operating system - which has been a security catastrophe. In case anyone wonders where this originated, it was the late 90s. The tech giants had a meeting and announced that the next frontier in security was ensuring the machine is secure against its owner. From then on its been a building process with TPMs and encrypted paths everywhere (for DRM) finally culminating in Microsoft feeling brave enough to mandate a TPM (whcih they said they wouldn't do) in Windows 11. None of which you are in a position to understand, read or approve/disapprove. In short you don't own that machine you paid for. Every Orwellian horror show from here on in is just a mystery encrypted software update away.
Why do you want RISC-V laptops? I don't think there is a mechanism to verify what is on a chip. A chip maker can say that it is using certain source files, but then use something else. There is no checksum that the hardware can perform to verify it is the same RTL (or whatever) as the source.
@@GaryExplains RISC V is more open than Intel or ARM - in fact there are designs that come with the CHISEL source - and you can verify those with a checksum. You can get those fabbed right now. The argument here is that because you can't be 100% certain all the way down at this moment, there's no point in bothering moving towards more open systems. The CPU is a critical layer that needs opening up.
Asahi is a great step forward. And, since we can get an M1 Air for US$1,000, it is pretty competitive against mainstream units from Lenovo, Samsung, HP, etc.
That is a very good detail to point out. Agree. Thank you. It's better priced in fact for better hardware. Performance comparisons would be interesting to see. And Virtual Win performance too.
I'm not sure it's easy to make arm motherboards that will take "whatever graphics cards we want", but I guess you'd know more about this possibility than I would. It would be so odd buying a graphics card for an arm based pc. Wouldn't they more likely be APUs?
Jeff Geerling has been covering PCIe GPU support on ARM for a number of years now. Most SBCs do not have a great PCIe implementation and need to be redone in order for GPUs to work out of the box - in the cases where it works (with great support), it is enterprise-only and priced well out of reach for the ordinary consumer.
Look into Nvidia's ARM SBCs. It's not quite what you're looking for (yet) but they have Nvidia GPU cores on die with ARM CPU cores (essentially an ARM APU), which seems to be the most practical way to get traditionally usable graphics on an ARM system at the moment. If you must use a PCIe add-in card I believe I've seen people try to do it with the Pine64 Rockpro64 if I'm not mistaken, but I believe it was a massive effort with limited success.
You were early to this party. In fact I thought of your arm video when I read his comment. Glad you have been vindicated. Ironically my favourite computer was the A440 running RiscOS... Feels like we are coming full circle!
I use macbook m1 with arm ubuntu desktop running with qemu utm. It gives me around 10hrs of battery backup while doing web development. Arm battery over performance is great
@@GaryExplains I got my MBA M1 for $899 1,5 years ago. The price is the critical point here. It's what makes the base MBA M1 amazing and the MBA M2 a bit disappointing.
The struggle with Intel, AMD and Nvidia for open source graphics drivers has been going on for years. Nvidia is still holding back on the secrets of their graphics cards. Now we start from scratch with Apple, Rockchip, Samsung and other large players in the ARM world. When will they release the information that's needed to make high performance graphics drivers? The problem is that these companies produce smartphones and iPhones and they fear the day when they can't end the life of a product because of open source alternative operating systems 😉.
The difference to Asahi: Apple does not lock down the hardware cryptographically (like Nvidia does). This theoretically allows easy reverse engineering given sufficient time (a few years)
Nice comment but I dont think Apple cares about end of life of its products. I suppose Apple doesn’t want publish a part of their technologies to others
@@TheFredFred33 When your a company the size of apple you end up cross licensing IP etc from many vendors. It would be a legal rats nest for them to just open source everything even if they wanted to. They do open source quite a bit but are very intentional about that (kernel is open source of source, not to mention all the work they do on LLVM).
Apple deliberately designed it's ARM systems so you could boot whatever OS you'd like on them, they just fon't provide assistance on you doing it, you congratulate the Asahi Team but not enough to pay attention to what they themselves say on the matter, it's not closed hardware.
Sadly, the real problem is that the M1/M2 chips are many times more capable than RPis and the like. ARM is just the technology which powers the chip. What's missing is ARM CPUs of the class that Apple is building. The market is flooded with Intel, and there's not much reason to design an ARM CPU of that magnitude, except for a company like Apple. There's no incentive for IBM or HP or Dell to design a desktop capable ARM CPU when Intel can supply all the chips they need.
@@StaceyAyodele hard to stay on the top, when your x86 device use almost the same power just remain in idle and showing the screen saver, like the ARM based device on full load. It will limit your capacity in the future, you need sometimes 1000W power supply to reach that x86 performance, when Apple not far from that performance with a bit more than 100W. So what do you think who can double the performance, and power consumption more, before they will reach the limit?
@@randomcomment9992 ARM devices that manufacturers make currently are locked down and have no upgradability. I'm not spending $1000+ on a computer I can't upgrade down the line if I want to. For this reason, I don't see ARM computers being a good option for those of us that want upgradeable systems.
@@StaceyAyodele than you can use this forever, and never get a better and faster device in the future.. since they are already limited in a few country.. even the more powerful desktops are over 6-800W power consumption, they are limited to max 600W, over that they can't sell anything.. So bye-bye RTX 3090 Ti (5-600W power consumption possibility) + good CPU (2-300W power consumption possibility). You can't get both in California, and most country will follow this, when the 1000W common power supply will even raised to increase the performance to more..
@@randomcomment9992 3090ti is like 4k$ and youre worried about power consumption? why? you can easily afford electricity if youre spending money on a 3090ti.. come on
It's like I say, though (and as you seem to imply towards the end there), we don't need systems like the Apple M1/M2, the Surface Pro X, or even the Raspberry Pi. What we need is a sort of affordable ARM system that's got all the features you'd expect from a desktop PC. PCIe slots, NVMe, USB 3.0, Gigabit ethernet, RAM and CPUs you can change out, an ATX-compatible form factor (mini-ITX, DTX, mATX, full ATX... so on), and a system that's NOT purpose-built for the server space.
I just want cheap SBCs, lots of RAM, access to newer ARM revisions and NVMe everywhere. Oh and ECC stuff baked in like with the CM4. Linus did a rant on that topic too. 😊
What a lot of consumers would love: ARM 2-in-1 Tablet-Laptop mini eg Surface Go "Air" using the Surface Go Form Factor and cutting the weight right down to equivalent with iPad Air M1 at about ~450g + 250g typecover detachable to easily use for media consumption as well as full-fat OS for on-the-go work tinkering. The weight, multi-modal input, convergence of devices and connectivity, long arm battery life are all essential. The fact Apple does not offer this is a market niche waiting to be exploited. In the capacity of lighter, thinner and longer-lasting battery life (power efficiency) this is where ARM can make immediate gains over Intel/AMD as per Smart Phones already. Windows On Arm (WOA) has some way to go to match MacOS integration with hardware-OS-Apps which is a challenge also. In respect to the above, Linux could be more efficient however a lot more work is needed on Touch GUI in Linux for the above convergence.
the thing we need is more non apple arm chips with that level of grunt to perform like a laptop. personally the $850 refurbished m1 air is a amazing deal now for what you get in a laptop I use mine with a 2tb 3.0 nvme drive in my thunderbolt hub with no real penalty on storage speed I also think that its nice to jump into and out off all the os builds on one device. I run parallels
Hi Gary, i switched from an lenovo thinkpad with archlinux to a mac pro 2021, because i was so impressed from the performance per watt. I tried yabai for the i3 feel but it wasn't the same. Right now i'm okay with macos, because it's an okayish compromise for me, between linux for work and windows for beeing creative and creating music and stuff. But deep in my heart i'm missing linux and i would love to have arch bare metal on my mac.
They don't have to prevent it, they just have to NOT open their system and let them properly support it. Don't get up in the few normies. The majority of people will not buy a laptop to run an OS that is not officially supported in it. If you do that, you are up *AT ANY TIME* for your PC to stop working, either at some part or completely. So yeah, Apple just doesn't care.
The new MacBooks are the first time since the 2000s that I have really noticed the performance increase from an upgrade. Upgrades in recent years have always been yeah it’s faster, but these macs are nuts.
2 роки тому
You are just a cool Guy. I've always fun to listen to your videos. Because you speak sooo fast. And yoI give so much fundamental information in all aspects about IT SW or Hardware. Other people here wound either have a 10x longer video than yours or then split it into 10 videos. I'm kind of impressed about your visionary ideas here. Congratulation
The advantage of ARM chips is energy efficiency which makes it ideal for laptops. Gamers have different priorities. I don't see the point for a low cost ARM desktop but I like the idea of a serviceable/modular ARM laptop where you can replace graphics, screen, memory, ssd etc. Love your discussions.
I think the ability to reach high performance at low TDP will have gamers interested. Look at how power-hungry the next gen video cards will be. Wouldn't it be nice to have a 90W CPU that performs like an x86 250W TDP CPU? It'll help with heat management and also spare high wattage requirements on your PSU. So... TL;DR I think gamers could be interested, if high-performance low-TDP chips were available.
In terms of performance that sounds about right. ARM is generally more efficient by not needing such a large decoder, but high performance CPUs translate to micro-ops anyway, so they're more similar than different. This should mean x86/64 would only be slightly behind ARM on the desktop. (I could be wrong, of course.) I'd still like to see ARM on desktops so developers can more easily support it. But I'd rather see RISC-V. Not for any particular technical reasons. I just find it appealing and I like what it stands for. If I make a homebrew CPU, emulator, or FPGA project using RISC-V (might do someday for fun), I'm protected against attack by lawyers. That's no small thing. They're the thugs that destroy projects, companies, and lives. They steal money, get people imprisoned, suppress innovation, and generally just create fear and misery. That's not a problem for enthusiasts of RISC-V. It's better with ARM these days because RISC-V forced them to be better, but they're still in it for the money and protected by law.
@@JB52520 That's a good point. ARM instruction set has grown to be more CISC-y, and x86 processors translate to an internal instruction set anyway. The cost of those translators is estimated to be 3-5% in modern CPUs. But... not only not paying that cost, but also freeing up die space for other things, is definitely an advantage.
The M1 Mac Mini is not upgradeable, but I bought a new base model (8 GB RAM & 256 GB storage) for $620 ($570 + sales tax) at Costco in the U.S.. I would have liked more RAM, but I still thought it was a pretty good deal. Next year we'll have more ARM-based Windows & Linux PC's. Thanks for the video!
so if your very skilled at soldering you *can* upgrade it people have upgraded by SSD and RAM on these devices but these tend to be shops that already are used to doing this to phones.
I currently run debian and archlinux on a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Using Samsung Dex to display on the monitor, Termux to install the repos, and packages,(Andronix helps with this), a VNC viewer that is compatible with Dex (MultiVNC), and the XFCE4 desktop environment. It took a little trial and error, but I've installed debian, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Kali, Fedora, and Manjaro. Mostly with XFCE4 and LXDE. I am absolutely NOT a Linux expert, especially when trying to install and run it on devices other than PCs. I'm not a programmer, and grew up with Windows. Be Advised, you need to get Termux from F-Droid, and not the play store. Everything else can be downloaded from Google Play. The Termux version from play store won't work.
As if Apple will support open source initiative. Anytime Apple wishes, it could block any 3rd party OS from being installed in a multi-boot config. I have MBP 16 2019 and I cannot find a safe way to properly multi-boot with the T2 chip security enforced. The possibility of bricking your Apple computer is always there. And for those system developers (Java, Javascript, Python, etc.) saying they are X times more productive in Mac than in PC, well dream on. I am one of those hoping back then when I bought my 3000 USD MBP16. Also, for me x86 is still a better option if supporting old versions (5+ yrs old) of developed software or currently developing for cloud deployment. For the cloud it is better to have a dev machine as close to your cloud server which are majority in x86 CPU.
I got my MBA M1 for frontend and App development and I am loving it for battery life and lightness but have had few issues with it here and there with development.
Personally I think it was a brilliant move on Linus' part to announce this. It's a win-win situation. Wink wink nudge nudge. Apple gets some free publicity, maybe someone at apple will look into that GPU problem and make some contributions. Everybody wins. Except Nvidia, Intel and AMD :D Apple is being asked to enter into a very select club, and mind you, by the head hancho. On the front door. Thing is, linux devs don't need help figuring out the cpu, the memory, the peripherals. Power management was somewhat complicated, but other then that, GPU will be the hardest problem to crack. On the other hand, Apple has no reason to hold back, because it is not competing directly with Nvidia or AMD in that space yet, but it could sell a lot more hardware if people were just comfortable putting linux on it and playing stuff. They been kinda ambivalent about it. About people running their OS on other hardware, and people running other OSes on their hardware. All the big kids are doing it (contributing to linux kernel)... why not apple?
So IF you indeed create the absolutely greatest M2-specific Linux-ARM-app, with getting THE MOST out of that silicon, and their CPU, GPU, Thunderbolt, etc. WHO do you want to sell it to? Apple is already a SMALLER fraction of all PCs, M2 is an even smaller fraction of that, and then THOSE who have the urge to convert their M2 to Linux should be an abysmally small market. Weird thinking. And it won't even be on the Appstore.
I don't remember saying that these Arm based machines need to run Linux specifically. Yes that is what Linus wants, but that isn't going to be a commercial success, is it. We need high performance, yet better priced, Arm based laptops and desktops to run Linux, Windows, and Chrome OS.
Gary, I really miss the Speed Test G tests, I know that you think that Speed Test G videos weren't that popular but I think if you give some time to it, Speed Test G can overtake Geekbench in popularity.
Absolutely this. Torvalds is almost always ahead of the game when it comes to technical leadership and x86 has been really limiting for a long time. Just the fact that platform relies on proprietary BIOS firmware essentially unchanged since 1979 is pretty indicative of where x86 stands.
I've used both the Apple machines and distros of Linux and keep going back to my LG 16" Gram since it is so light and powerful. Most of the things I want to do with my 3 computers are easily done on this machine and I don't want to spend the time and effort to learn a new OS. I believe most folks feel this way and specialist users have their os of their choice and we are all happy.
The biggest difficulty in developing Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon Macs is that the Apple Silicon Macs are completely proprietary systems with no information published by Apple on how the internals work and operate. As a result the difficulty for Asahi Linux developers is that they have to completely reverse engineer Apple Silicon to develop proper drivers for all the hardware. One of the toughest parts is the Apple Silicon GPUs. Right now Asahi Linux lacks GPU acceleration and the Asahi Linux development team are still hard at work develop GPU acceleration.
I bought a brand new on sale $100 Chromebook, was not sure why it was cheap when I bought it.Turns out it's a 64bit ARM. ChromeOS is 32bit but Linux dev env VM is 64bit. There are some compatability issues but not a big deal. The biggest surprise is that the battery last a long time and usually don't have to charge the whole day. I can use it as a light dev machine and just remote desktop to home computer for more demanding dev coding. So it has been a great experience. Another benefit, I don't have to worry if it gets stolen when I leave it to go to the bathroom. I call it disposable computer.
Maybe it'll happen one day, but I don't see it happening any time soon because of the lack of backward compatibility. Most consumers just don't care about Intel vs. ARM. They just want a computer that runs the programs they already have. As a result, the market for this sort of thing is too small for hardware manufacturers to want to produce ARM laptops in large enough quantities for the price to come down.
Only scenarios I've seen in the wild are low-end Chromebooks. Who knows, maybe once the Framework platform matures, we might see new board options for ARM and RISC-V
If Qualcomm or Samsung manage to make a comparable chip to M1 then it would be a great opportunity for Linux to emerge as a solid desktop alternative for the masses. Dell/HP or any other major PC manufacturer will have to use Linux if they want to compete with Apple as Windows sucks ass on Arm!
for Qualcomm or Samsung to get somthing competitive to M1 they would need to spend a LOT more on R&D so the chip cost would cost a LOT more. In the sort term apple movieg to arm will mean the margin they are making on each Mac is lower as they have put a massive R&D spend into this migration.
I've had a Linux ARM64 laptop for a long time. A Chromebook. I also have a Chromebox for a desktop. The built-in Debian Linux environment is great too for console apps and X apps
Absolutely agree with you concerning the need for ARM laptop/desktop computers. With the greater efficiency of ARM over the ancient X86 architecture, ARM could be a way to get more performance with less watts and heat. High end discreet graphics cards are an example of X86 stupidity, consuming ever greater amounts of energy for just a little bit more performance. Theoretically with ARM, a more efficient CPU coupled with high bandwidth onboard graphics could provide even better performance with a fraction of the wattage, heat, and price.
ARM processors for PCs are presently made for servers. Not cheap but lots of power. I think manufacturers will soon see there is a gap in the market lower down. They are always better for power consumption and consumers are more worried now about rising bills.
Apple M chips/hardware may be a chance for the linux community = less hardware to support = focusing on user experience/simplicity + longevity of support in bonus !
This is very cool, and feeling safer going to M1/2 when replacing my 2015 macbook pro (running linux). And I guess it will help the progress that the head honcho is running your distro too.
It's probably because Arm Windows hasn't caught up. The cheapest fastest devices are smartphones/tablets. Orange Pi 5 is not bad, but mobile development is leapfrogging.
Don't you understand that arm64 processors are SoC - system on a chip, that means that RAM, GPU and CPU as well as handful of other things like modem, neural engine, etc. are all embedded into the chip and this contributes to its efficiency and performance, that means no swappable parts, best you can hope for are SSD, but not with Apple though.
LOL, it isn't the fact that the CPU is part of an SoC that makes it efficient. It is the CPU design that makes it efficient. Also, Arm's server CPUs in its Neoverse range are also more efficient than the Intel and Amd counterparts that is why Google, Amazon, and Microsoft now offer them in their cloud services.
thing is i want a machine can do it all so that is why unless game creators make games run on ARM chips as well as x86, i wun be going ARM at least on the desktop space? also i like to assemble my own system not be locked in into X RAM only or Y class GPU for the hardware (SOC)
One point tho, you say we need an arm pc with slotted ram,gpu and ssd, but the Mac machines have ran and gpu baked in, and even the ssd is special. I'm sure we're getting there (raspi gpu support already a thing), I'm just pointing this out
True. But the reason why the PC has been successful over the decades is its modular approach. We need that, not more custom built computers where nothing is upgradable.
@@GaryExplains i totally agree. Just pointing it out. I've been bothering my friend for the last decade about why phones don't come with sockets for CPUs, I'm sure he's tired of it (i know why, but still)
The problem that Linus stated many years about the Arm architecture is that every SoC is customized to the extent that the Linux kernel has to be customized for every single SoC chip. This is in stark contrast to the x86 side where you just add support for a new CPU, chipset, GPU -- easy peasy. For example, Linux critics complain about the proliferation of many different Linux distributions as compared with the uniformity of Windows and the Win32 API. (bad Linux, good Windows) In this case, the Arm community is hurting itself by having too many choices out there. In order for Arm to "grow up", Arm needs to copy what IBM did in '84 -- standard CPU socket, chipsets (not really needed in Arm), and standard PC card slots. Until then, Arm will continue to be a hodgepodge.
Arm now has standards, called System Ready. It is growing in popularity, especially in the server space. Ultimately it will also be popular in the PC space but so far neither Apple or Qualcomm/Microsoft have adopted it.
I want to ask you a question and I hope you read this and answer me. Why can’t we make use of android tablets to install linux especially when they are available everywhere, cheap, some have have strong hardware and their operating systems update for no more than two years. This might help too many people find suitable pc (like) machines easily.
I'm puzzled by this. Maybe I am mistaken, but there are tons of ARM based chromebooks out there. I assume some can have unlocked bootloaders and dev modes, and would be *at* least as viable for Linux usage as the Mac which has required the ASAHI linux bods to put in a lot of work, and I suspect that on that Mac you'll have a more limited choice care of that. I will agree that most of those come with limited upgradability - soldered ram and so on. So that remains an issue (but again, mac books = same problem at a much greater price).
this is good news now if arm chip architects would make a serious desktop or laptop offering other then microsoft and snapdragons bespoke surface arm chips we could possibly see the arm pc landscape boom
The problem is that the only viable way for that to happen would be for Windows to get into it seriously... Because I don't think Linux is going to get the the numbers for the hardware companies to invest in the development of what we need... It's a shame that Microsoft tried to do it when ARM was not on par with x86 performance.
Thinkpad launched an Arm based laptop, albeit a bit overpriced. The Pi400 is a great Arm desktop machine for under 100 bucks. In fact I don't understand why the Pi400 is not a bigger success, it is IMO potentially the home computer of the 2020's, 40 years after the C64.
I dont feel that good about "moving away from x86" going from proprietary to proprietary like switching from water to H2O, we should be doing work on Risc-V
Why? Are you planning on designing a chip at any time soon. You understand that all RISC-V designs are proprietary by default. There is nothing magic in RISC-V that makes the chips any less proprietary.
It costs hundred's of millions to design, make, and sell a competitive CPU. There is no way a company would invest all that, just to give it away. Please be realistic. Hardware isn't like software.
Despite being a completely closed platform, ironically Apple M-series chips will probably end up being the best supported hardware on Linux compared to other ARM SoCs.
Apples SOC is one of the most open of the ARM chips out there, you might think it is a closed platform but that is in fact quite wrong.
Things like once the boot manager hands over to your kernel only your kernel code is running there is no device manager engine like on intel/amd systems with full access to the system or a ring level below your kernel running the UEFI etc.
Due to the sheer marketshare and people following the effort. Mainline Linux for Snapdragon devices is there for some devices like the 835 and very smooth sailing as I've found out. And Alwinner devices support is really good under Linux Sunxi, except for the propietary things like video acceleration, however they are mostly on cheap chinese devices and enthusiast single board computers so they are a way less sexy target
@@hishnash never heard of tee apparently.
@@hishnashtor browser
Uplink
The ARM Linux port was started in 1994, when Linux only ran on i386 (before MIPS, Alpha etc. support). The original port was a single-handed effort by Russell King in his spare time while he was an undergraduate at Southampton University, and first booted on his Acorn Archimedes A5000. I think the first available ARM release was based on Linux 1.1.59 (from Oct 1994), and was released during 1995. A few years previously Russell has been in my secondary school computer club, where he neatly out-coded me and everyone else I knew by a mile. More details can be found at "The History of ARM Linux".
Great story and Archimedes holds a special place in my heart!
@@DavidAspden I did a bit of excavation and although the ARM port first booted in 1994, it didn't start getting merged into mainline Linux in earnest until Jan 1998 with Linux 2.1.80 (when arch/arm appeared in the tree), although some preparatory patches had already been merged before then.
@@Tim_Small Can you give a link to "The History of ARM Linux"? Looking it up isn't quite clear what source your referencing.
I truly love it, thanks for sharing ❤
I love my M1 MacBook and I love Linux. I can't wait for Linux to have full GPU acceleration on Apple hardware, it'll become my daily driver. I wonder if Linus using Asahi will in any way add momentum to the Linux on Apple Silicon initiative - perhaps drawing interest (and assistance in the project) from Apple. Probably not, but I need hope, haha.
I couldn't imagine a better portable environment to develop on. Crazy long battery life, unreal CPU performance, incredible screen, best track pad in the industry _and_ full fat Linux. Running containers natively and having access to the Vulkan API.
Probably not from apple lol, that would be a conflict of interest, but surely from other projects.......surely........hopefully.......probably........maybe
@@fuseteam I checked out the progress on the GPU driver and the creator estimates they will have a working driver capable of rendering a desktop environment by the end of the year.
Pretty incredible progress and the whole reverse engineering journey is extremely fascinating - worth checking out if you're curious about systems programming
@@DavidAlsh cool that's quite impressive indeed, all without apple's help ;)
I'm definitely following the news of where this goes
@@DavidAlsh And depending on the hardware quirks getting the GPU drivers stable may or may not take a long time. For example, the GPU driver for intel GPUs is still a bit unstable even after over a decade of work and some level of support by intel engineers working on it. The issue seems to be that the intel GPU locks for some input and the driver needs to do all kind of tricks to avoid the hardware from locking up. If Apple GPU has similar problems, creating a working stable driver will be an enormous effort. If Apple hardware is actually good, then creating reverse engineered GPU driver will be much easier.
@@MikkoRantalainen that's really great insight. I'm not knowledgeable in driver development or reverse engineering hardware to create drivers so that really helped add to my understanding of the challenges
It was no coincidence that ARM processors were installed in mobile phones and Ipads and so on.
The reason is simply low power consumption and limited battery capacity. I've been using the Paspberry pi 4 as a desktop PC for exactly 3 years. Power consumption 3W idle 5W full load at 2Ghz clocking with oversized passive cooling at 35°C. The future belongs to ARM processors with Linux operating system. This is not only efficient but also environmentally friendly. This would not be possible without the brilliant Linus Benedict Torvalds.
@Daniel Rumbacher should be a lot simpler for people to get HW accretion support on apple silicon for these things due to the ability to lift macOS up into M1N1 (vm like layer) and track exactly how it talks to any other bit of the system without macOS bothering/detective it is being snooped on.
@Daniel Rumbacher The solution Asahi Linux is taking is to not attempt to replace the proprietary firmware.
inserted they pull this firmware during install time: how boot works means that when the pre-boot hands over to your kernel literally nothing is started up apart from a single e-core for your kernel. It is your responsibility to start up any part of the SOC you like and provide it with the firmware blob (this is great as you can pin the firmware version to your kernel even if someone has macOS installed using more uptodate firmwares this does not effect Linus at all). Then when up update your linux install to a version that wants newer firmware it can pull those blobs it wants. This is a key features of these chips!
Apple provide fully legal way to pull down the firmware during first install.
Apple really does not block free software, they are the main developers behind massive open source projects like LLVM. There have also made key changes to pre-boot and boot loader signing that have no use case for apple but made things much simpler and easier for the linux on M1 team. It is clear apple have no issue with this project and most likly like it quite a lot to put engineering time into making things better, they also keep in putting useful negates of info into the Darwin kernel (the open source part of macOS) that have helps the devs on this platform. The image that apple Is apposed to open source is just utterly wrong, vast amounts of the work apple does depends on it and they contribute back to the community a lot.
@Daniel Rumbacher , @matthaus woolard: I agree with you that hardware acceleration for graphics and videos is essential for these applications. There are no doubts in my mind about that. However, manufacturers secrecy about their drivers and other factors are definitely hindering the needed advances that we are all craving as a community.
A potential solution to this problem is offering a huge number of specialized cores in the processor itself. This is a kind of a trend nowadays, especially in AMD's APUs. GPUs embedded in APUs would not be exactly the same as specialized cores, though. They could be directly accessed by a program without using shaders or drivers. High level programming languages are not quite prepared for this, except one: Go. Go has an intrinsic generic assembly that can be further compiled for efficiency in a given architecture. So instead of a low level driver, the programmer would have a library that would use the resource if it exists. It would be desirable to have a hardware scheduler to distribute the tasks back and forth the given specialized cores. This would be potentially highly efficient and would eliminate the need of graphics cards for most applications requiring them.
The big problem with graphics cards is their high energy consumption and the communication bottleneck by needing to transfer the whole contents through an external bus. With specialized cores one would eliminate the need of graphics cards internal memory, communication (bus) bottlenecks, drivers and shaders, transferring these problems to a highly parallel and highly efficient managing hardware to transfer the tasks back and forth the specialized cores.
Another advantage of specialized cores is that they could be conceived in a standardized way. Thus, future versions could be merely extensions (more cores, for examples).
As I said, APUs are already slowly going in that way. It would be a great thing if ARM (and other processors, such as RISC-V) started to do the same.
Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be fully implemented on Apple silicon. Apple silicon is levels better than Intel and AMD offering especially with regards to performance efficiency which is essential for laptops
With the quality of code by amazing people like Asahi Lina, I think it will not take long
My bet is that it will take A LOOONG time for them to reverse-engineer FULL hardware support for M2 into Apple's secretive proprietary world. You think Apple will allow them to have Linux running better on a Mac than MacOX?
@@hstrinzel it is no more secretive than any other platform to be fair, and given some of the hardware features such as being able to lift macOS fully into a very light weight VM (M1N1) they are able to sniff what it is doing very easily. This is a much simpler project than trying to reverse engineers most other hardware out there. The other benefit they have is that each of the added SOC features tends to be connected to its own little arm core that they can load the firmware (apple provide at install time). This exposes a high level interface to the CPU. So they do not need to write a low level display controler firmware that talks DisplayPort and handles display port handshakes as that is all done by the display controler cpu and firmware provided by apple all they need to do is see what remove function calls macSO sends to it and gets back from it and implement that interface in linux. (more or less a header file and some of that is even in the open source Darwin kernel that they can read over to help them figure these things out).
what would give better fps on linux steam with x86 games running with proton. an m1 macbook air with asahi, or with an amd ryzen 7 3700u or 5700u? the example game i like to inquire for is no mans sky on playable settings at 900p. but if you have any idea of how those two hardware compare in general for gaming that would appreciated.
@@jangofet555 Currently Asahi linux doe snot have GPU drivers and even when it does the GPU drivers it will get first are OpenGL once as this is much easier to developer. There is a team working on VK drivers but this will be be the TBDR subset of VK (not the set of VK apis that PC games expect and not what proton expects).
Many people misunderstand VK it is not a single api it is more of a collection of seperate apis and depending not the hardware you have you implement the selection of features that match that hardware (you do not attempt to emulate other hardware that is againts the concept of VK). Apples GPUs are close to those by PowerVK and are TBDR gpus this means they have quite a different VK feature set to the TBIR gpus made by AMD/NVidia and Intel so PC games (and proton) that are coded for VK are in fact not coded for generic VK they are coded for TBIR PC VK subset of apis.
In summary playing an un-modfied PC game on these machines will not run very well as if someone puts a shim in to support the cpus these games expect to be present it will be a shim with a load of nasty overhead.
Been feeling so alone with these thoughts, great to get some confirmation from you and the legend himself. Cheers!
I've owned a MBA M1 for 1,5 years now and while I certainly have my issues with Apple, it's an incredibly impressive laptop and Rosetta works very well. Can't wait for Asahi to be developed enough for me to switch!
u can run Windows x86 in a VM?
@@1MinuteFlipDoc running x86 windows is costly as translating the kernel live has a big perf impact. Better to run ARM64 windows with x86 translation embedded (but MS translation is not perfect). Apple this year did expose their Rosseta2 to linux VM guests (and based on the license could also be used by Asahi linux when running on apple hardware).
Same story here - I got all of my M1 units at launch and they are stupendous (for what they are). I'm writing this on an M1 MBA and it's stupid good.
Reasons for switching?
@@1MinuteFlipDoc I have the pro expensive annual Parallels subscription running on the maxed out M1 pro
never in my life I struggled this much with a piece of software
I love it yet hate it in the same time I could rant for hours about my experience (I mainly do Software engineering and Penetration testing/Red Teaming) in my device
also had to do some Data Science (worked phenomenally)
during my Software engineering work I struggled a lot cuz I had to go thru some hardware specific code (no emulation will help you there as of today for variety of reasons)
also, had to do some Ruby (with Jykell and that was such a pain in the ass that's uncalled for)
but the thing I had to struggle with the most is working with certain tool for my job and while I was pentesting a target I had to install certain lib problem is many of tools in the industry are not compiled with ARM on mind that was a struggle as I come from a Software engineering (worked as a Full stack dev and Data science stuff) it's easier for me than the majority of people in the tech industry to modify code on the fly without breaking their flow while they are analyzing a target
so I would not recommend M1 for any pentesters, except the main reason why I bought them: Mobile Penetration Testing And bug bounty hunting .. if that's something you don't do at the moment skip the whole M series heck all Macbooks
There are a few reasons why Asahi linux fits the needs for this type of development - it's not just working but it is *very* competitive for compile times. Another important piece would be the intended use case - Asahi isn't there yet for what "the average consumer" would look for yet such as multimedia. This will take some time.
I adore my Pinebook Pro for basic tasks and I do look forward to a more capable SoC plugged into it (a few other h-w improvements would be welcomed especially around power delivery). And even when that moment comes to be a reality, I would imagine the M1 SoC to still be more capable in raw computational performance.
With that said - more affordable and more capable ARM SoC are on the horizon. Being excited as of what rk3558 SBCs can bring to the table for enabling the infrastructure is an understatement. Distro maintainers and community members will gain a sizeable upgrade without resorting to devices that are either very expensive + specialized (Honeycomb?) or forced into Apple silicon exclusively (the performance comes with quite a few strings attached - especially for long term support).
Either way, aarch64 landscape outlook looks very good compared to just 3 years ago. The options are multiplying and reaching the hands of users and developers alike 😁
Note:
Startup on arm devices is still *very* messy unfortunately (cough, uboot, cough). Projects like tow-boot are amazing at removing some of the initial hurdles preventing interested community members at even getting a distro started up on the board of their choice.
I can’t wait for your videos, Boss!!
As you pointed out, Apple has been doing this for years. They have fine tuned it from all the way back to the A4 chip, iPhone 5, I believe. We are now up to M1, which is essentially an A14x with a bit more functionality. It could take awhile for others to catch up.
I love my Mac for Web Development, as well as Android Studio and Xcode. Homebrew works quite well for package management. For my use case, MacOS provides for all my dev needs. YMMV
FYI we are now up to the M2, here is my video about it ua-cam.com/video/wDDLD47G-IU/v-deo.html
The M series architecture is not a derivation of the A series chipsets. It’s from a completely different ARM architecture that Steve Jobs purchased the rights to before he passed away.
This is Job’s masterpiece. Not something he paid TI for. Hence he hired a bunch of ARM systems engineers and TI guys and had Apple build a plant in Texas near TI so they could scalp TI engineers. This is Steve still showing the tech industry who the boss is, even from the grave.
Knowing Apple drops support of older hardware over time, it’d be nice to be able to confidently run Linux on the Apple silicon as a daily driver.
Out of curiosity what brand(s) are you implying that make genuinely usable laptops that don't drop support of hardware after a decade?
Long story short we users, customers definitely want these computing devices maintained, patched as long as possible independently of any vendor. At least, I think that was the point that the prior post was to make.
@@StormBurnX most laptop brands drop support for (at the OEM level) very quickly after release, they just depend on MS supporting things but stuff like firmware updates typically last for less than a few years if that.
Based on apple's history with macOS we can easily expect 10 years of security updates for these devices (firmware and os).. might not get new os features for all of those 10 years but sec updates is what matters.
@@hishnash can confirm from personal experience getting various updates 7+ years after purchasing a macbook air over a decade ago, which is nice, but OP seems to complain it's not enough which is why I was curious what "better" brand they were trying to imply exists, otherwise they're just complaining for the sake of complaining it seems
@@StormBurnX the real nice factor is getting firmware updates as well not just os updates. So many OEMs just do not bother at all in the laptop (and desktop space).
I have an M1 MacBook Air and I have to say that it’s my favorite system. I’m waiting for Asahi to become fully stable and then I will need to determine the space trade off as far as getting it ready. I have not partitioned or dual booted in a very long time and that’s the one thing that makes me very nervous, especially because of the rather untraditional installation one will have to go through for this. My hope is that eventually we can do what we do with all other systems and boot from a USB and maybe even run in live mode before committing. I realize given Apple’s locked down nature, that such a wish may be our in the sky, but hey, one can dream right? I’m also looking forward to seeing Linux running on these pieces that are powered by the QUALCOMM snapdragon.
Lovely as always. Thanks Gary.
My current main portable is a Nokia T20 Android tablet, so yes I would love to see more laptops around $500, or less with ARM CPU's with open firmware so we can install whatever Linux distro we want that has an ARM build. Same for desktop motherboards with good ARM chips, and expansion, it's been done before in the past with the Arcon Archimedes machines, and it can be done again.
I am a person who has dreamed of a commercial computer/notebook using ARM architecture for years. I see that the biggest problem is the lack of industry standardization. You find several development boards using ARM like RaspberryPI. However, it is necessary to standardize a type of SOCKET for the ARM processor and a standard motherboard configuration. Unlike the x86 market that only has two manufacturers, ARM processors have several. No one is going to invest, at this first moment, in a motherboard that forces them to be tied to a single manufacturer. A motherboard that supports several different models and manufacturers is the best solution.
Around the end of 2010 I came to the conclusion that ARM was the future and that x86 had run it's course.
As you have stated ( pleaded) we need ARM CPUs that we can buy the same as we buy AMD or Intel ones. Along with the motherboards for them, just as there are for AMD and Intel. I assume that what we are asking for is ARM hardware parity with x86.
The thing with arm and part of the revolutiomn it brings, is that there _is_ no standalone cpu. The M1 tauted by linus is an SoC, all pf them are. It's a 'system on a chip' it contains, in the case of the m1; the cpu, the gpu and the ram on a single chip which improves its performances drastically but an SoC can also contain other processing units like a video processing unit, an image processing unit, a neural processing unit. and it still requires a motherboard. Interesting enough apple's m1 even contains an ssd controller so that raw memory modules are used as a storage device
SoC _could_ potentially be expandable with extra memory, 'external' gpus and what not but that remains to be seen.
But basically wat we're asking is to renew the computer build to be more modern with ARM SoC's rather than the legacy x86 CPUs, which has power(both computational and battery) benefits, see the M1 ;)
A love how people comment (in generally, not only in the tech space) how "we need" and "we want" something just because they are just want
Marketing and production works in a specific way. The things that are created are the things that "we need" and "we want". The truth is that most people don't give a single shit about if their devices will user ARM, X86, RISCV, MIPS or whatever! Hell, most people don't even know what these stuff is. Most people just understand and care about performance, battery life, features and cost. Until ARM (or anyone else) can offer something that will set it apart, the average consumer won't care. And unfortunately, unless it can excel in 2-3 sectors, if it's just 1 sector, that 1 sector needs to be performance because the average normie user just gets "craaaazyyy" about performance.
I don't say that to say something bad about you or to offend you. I just wanted to point out that realization that I see more and more often as time goes. And again, it's a phenomenon that happens in every space. We humans (and I'm putting myself inside, so you don't call me a hypocrite) do so much self-projecting without even realize it, lol!
As a LinuxMint user and a RedHat aspirant myself, my opinion is that,
for manufactures (not Apple) to make more affordable Arm based PCs and Linux machines, more people must start using Linux based OS. And to make Linux to Appeal to the masses, more professional useful Softwares must be developed or made compatible in Linux OS.
I would love to see an Arm setup where the RAM and GPU aren't completely "sealed" within the SoC as they are in Apple machines. From a "freedom" standpoint, Apple's design (beyond its excellent arm architecture) is extremely troubling to me because it places Apple Corporation in a stranglehold position vis-a-vis consumers who need a tiny bit more RAM or SSD space. The entire structure feels extremely anti-competitive - like a hardware "black box" on your lap, which is antithetical to Linux and downright ironic as far as the free software movement is concerned.
@@TFirsty I don't disagree, but I lament the fact that our computers are at best turning into sealed devices akin to gaming consoles, and at worst into engineering duplicates of cellphones. Considering what the NSA has done with cellphone technology in placing the entire population under surveillance, this does not bode well for anyone interested in using technological tools to promote critical thought or dissent. This is especially true for journalists and human rights activists around the world.
I find all of this quite alarming, to be honest.
@@TFirsty This isn't really true at all. SoCs are good for power efficiency reasons but they don't really contribute to performance at all.
Why do you think AMD use chiplets for both CPUs and GPUs? Because they give higher performance and are cheaper and easier to manufacture.
Even Apple use two processor chips to make the M1 Ultra. There is actually a type of processor called a SoP (System on Package). All the Ryzen 7000 are SoPs as they have a chipset, GPU, CPU, and memory controller on the same package; this design type if compatible with chiplets as some components are in a separate chiplet but they all wire into the same substrate or package. M1 Ultra is also a SoP as are all M1 products.
As for SSDs the actual storage chips that hold the data can't be part of the SoC anyway, as seen in the Apple devices. Only the controller is part of the SoC and it supports multiple sizes of storage, Apple just choose to restrict what you can do with it because it benefits them to make devices non-upgradable. With some firmware updates they could make the M1 Ultra support upgradable storage modules quite easily, although these upgrade modules would have to be supported by the firmware and would be proprietary. It would be almost trivial for Apple to redesign the Macbook Pros using the same up-gradable modules instead of soldered on chips.
SoCs are also great for low power and cost devices like smartphones where performance isn't required. Even then you can make variants with up-gradable storage and sometimes RAM as well.
@@TFirsty Your literally talking about Intel as an example of performance coming with efficiency when they are the least efficient compared to AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm. Sure efficiency and performance can go together but it's really not that simple. Just look at RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 for an example.
Nobody actually puts their main DDR memory on the same chip as their processing in high performance systems. Even Apple M1 dosen't do this. It's on the same package not in the same chip, so you have a misunderstanding of what an SoC is here compared to an SoP.
I actually agree that putting memory on the same package can improve performance but I doubt it will be the only viable solution for quite a while. However the only things which substantially benefit from this approach are devices which use HBM such as GPUs and FPGAs as they actually make use of the better connection between processor and memory that MCM allows. This is partly because the pace of modern processors outstripped RAM decades ago. That's why we have cache. Even putting RAM on the same package isn't fast enough to remove the need for cache and you can see this with M1 itself.
Anyway all that aside even with SoPs that have integrated RAM you could always put the SoP on a separate processor card or mainboard that can be upgraded independently of storage and other hardware like IO ports, keyboard and screens. You can actually see this with the MNT Reform - although that design is far from ideal. The framework also has a swappable motherboard allowing upgrade to 12th gen processors from the original 11th gen without needing to replace the other parts. The only sustainable computer industry is one that promotes reuse of existing laptops and other products with new internals.
@@TFirsty What Intel chip are you talking about?
Alder lake runs stupid hot so it's obviously not that.
@John Q. Bebtelovimab That second part went seriously over my head, lol, but I'm right there with you brother! 😁✊
I just want a slim laptop with Snapdragon Elite X and Linux (with graphics etc everything running) and that's it. Really. It would be good enough for me for so many years.
Next up: we want RISC V laptops. Ones that can be verified from start to finish with a simple BIOS that can hand off to open source software. In case people hadn't realised yet (it can some as a shock) - the number of operating systems that sit UNDER linux/windows. I lost count of the total.. but here's some: the hypervisor, UEFI, SMM, Intel's management engine (ME) - all of these are large enough to be operating systems... and there are more still. You have NO idea how much software is running sneakily on your PC even if you think you are running Linux - it's encrypted, updated remotely... and all of it is being repurposed for 1) the manufacturer 2) the state three letter agencies. In others words: part of your machine is setup as an enclave ready for state snooping or tax, DRM etc. And all of it full of code that is rarely examined and full of security holes.
UEFI for example was a disaster - the BIOS boot process was a perfect example of something that needed to be as simple as possible. But Intel had its agenda and built UEFI - an operating system - which has been a security catastrophe.
In case anyone wonders where this originated, it was the late 90s. The tech giants had a meeting and announced that the next frontier in security was ensuring the machine is secure against its owner. From then on its been a building process with TPMs and encrypted paths everywhere (for DRM) finally culminating in Microsoft feeling brave enough to mandate a TPM (whcih they said they wouldn't do) in Windows 11. None of which you are in a position to understand, read or approve/disapprove. In short you don't own that machine you paid for.
Every Orwellian horror show from here on in is just a mystery encrypted software update away.
Would that apply to system76 machines?
Why do you want RISC-V laptops? I don't think there is a mechanism to verify what is on a chip. A chip maker can say that it is using certain source files, but then use something else. There is no checksum that the hardware can perform to verify it is the same RTL (or whatever) as the source.
@@GaryExplains Guess we'll have to build our own CPUs, might even start sourcing our own silicon
@@GaryExplains RISC V is more open than Intel or ARM - in fact there are designs that come with the CHISEL source - and you can verify those with a checksum. You can get those fabbed right now. The argument here is that because you can't be 100% certain all the way down at this moment, there's no point in bothering moving towards more open systems. The CPU is a critical layer that needs opening up.
Only the RISC-V specification is open source. Not (all) RISC-V processors. You can't verify what comes from the fab with the checksum of the source.
Asahi is a great step forward. And, since we can get an M1 Air for US$1,000, it is pretty competitive against mainstream units from Lenovo, Samsung, HP, etc.
for the performance in the thing an light long battery portable category is ia very competitive!
That is a very good detail to point out. Agree. Thank you. It's better priced in fact for better hardware. Performance comparisons would be interesting to see. And Virtual Win performance too.
1k? You can but that thing for around $700 when discounted(Amazon etc). You can buy the newer M2 for around $1k on Amazon discount.
@@bdkamil95 Good info to share, thank you.
Must be an ego boost for the creator of Asahi to have Torvalds using his particular distro.
for arm to truly do well in the PC market we have to be able to build custom PCs of our own with ARM if they ever hope to compete with AMD and Intel.
That looks like a Netrunner wallpaper on that machine
I'm not sure it's easy to make arm motherboards that will take "whatever graphics cards we want", but I guess you'd know more about this possibility than I would. It would be so odd buying a graphics card for an arm based pc. Wouldn't they more likely be APUs?
They use same architecture like vulkan or opengl
Jeff Geerling has been covering PCIe GPU support on ARM for a number of years now. Most SBCs do not have a great PCIe implementation and need to be redone in order for GPUs to work out of the box - in the cases where it works (with great support), it is enterprise-only and priced well out of reach for the ordinary consumer.
Look into Nvidia's ARM SBCs. It's not quite what you're looking for (yet) but they have Nvidia GPU cores on die with ARM CPU cores (essentially an ARM APU), which seems to be the most practical way to get traditionally usable graphics on an ARM system at the moment. If you must use a PCIe add-in card I believe I've seen people try to do it with the Pine64 Rockpro64 if I'm not mistaken, but I believe it was a massive effort with limited success.
You were early to this party. In fact I thought of your arm video when I read his comment. Glad you have been vindicated.
Ironically my favourite computer was the A440 running RiscOS... Feels like we are coming full circle!
I use macbook m1 with arm ubuntu desktop running with qemu utm. It gives me around 10hrs of battery backup while doing web development. Arm battery over performance is great
If Linus can endorse framework to work on this side. Framework will be a boom.
Lenovo x13s snapdragon laptop was realesed this year.
Starting at $1,301.40 😏
@@GaryExplains I got my MBA M1 for $899 1,5 years ago. The price is the critical point here. It's what makes the base MBA M1 amazing and the MBA M2 a bit disappointing.
The struggle with Intel, AMD and Nvidia for open source graphics drivers has been going on for years. Nvidia is still holding back on the secrets of their graphics cards. Now we start from scratch with Apple, Rockchip, Samsung and other large players in the ARM world. When will they release the information that's needed to make high performance graphics drivers? The problem is that these companies produce smartphones and iPhones and they fear the day when they can't end the life of a product because of open source alternative operating systems 😉.
The difference to Asahi: Apple does not lock down the hardware cryptographically (like Nvidia does). This theoretically allows easy reverse engineering given sufficient time (a few years)
Nice comment but I dont think Apple cares about end of life of its products. I suppose Apple doesn’t want publish a part of their technologies to others
Amdgpu drivers are all open source 🤨
@@TheFredFred33 When your a company the size of apple you end up cross licensing IP etc from many vendors. It would be a legal rats nest for them to just open source everything even if they wanted to. They do open source quite a bit but are very intentional about that (kernel is open source of source, not to mention all the work they do on LLVM).
Long live AARCH64, high performance & low instruction set!
R I S C
My congratulations to Asahi Team.
Make a reverse engineering on a closed hardware, made by an anti open-source company isn't a easy task.
Apple deliberately designed it's ARM systems so you could boot whatever OS you'd like on them, they just fon't provide assistance on you doing it, you congratulate the Asahi Team but not enough to pay attention to what they themselves say on the matter, it's not closed hardware.
Apples SoC is one of the most open ARM chips out there. If they were anti open source (Like MS, Intel and AMD) they wouldn’t do this at all
Apple is just locking down iPads and iphones
I would absolutely love to get an ARM desktop and laptop.
Sadly, the real problem is that the M1/M2 chips are many times more capable than RPis and the like. ARM is just the technology which powers the chip. What's missing is ARM CPUs of the class that Apple is building. The market is flooded with Intel, and there's not much reason to design an ARM CPU of that magnitude, except for a company like Apple. There's no incentive for IBM or HP or Dell to design a desktop capable ARM CPU when Intel can supply all the chips they need.
This is the reason that Intel/AMD will probably remain the main processor for PCs going forward I think.
@@StaceyAyodele hard to stay on the top, when your x86 device use almost the same power just remain in idle and showing the screen saver, like the ARM based device on full load. It will limit your capacity in the future, you need sometimes 1000W power supply to reach that x86 performance, when Apple not far from that performance with a bit more than 100W. So what do you think who can double the performance, and power consumption more, before they will reach the limit?
@@randomcomment9992 ARM devices that manufacturers make currently are locked down and have no upgradability.
I'm not spending $1000+ on a computer I can't upgrade down the line if I want to.
For this reason, I don't see ARM computers being a good option for those of us that want upgradeable systems.
@@StaceyAyodele than you can use this forever, and never get a better and faster device in the future.. since they are already limited in a few country.. even the more powerful desktops are over 6-800W power consumption, they are limited to max 600W, over that they can't sell anything.. So bye-bye RTX 3090 Ti (5-600W power consumption possibility) + good CPU (2-300W power consumption possibility). You can't get both in California, and most country will follow this, when the 1000W common power supply will even raised to increase the performance to more..
@@randomcomment9992 3090ti is like 4k$ and youre worried about power consumption? why? you can easily afford electricity if youre spending money on a 3090ti.. come on
It's like I say, though (and as you seem to imply towards the end there), we don't need systems like the Apple M1/M2, the Surface Pro X, or even the Raspberry Pi. What we need is a sort of affordable ARM system that's got all the features you'd expect from a desktop PC. PCIe slots, NVMe, USB 3.0, Gigabit ethernet, RAM and CPUs you can change out, an ATX-compatible form factor (mini-ITX, DTX, mATX, full ATX... so on), and a system that's NOT purpose-built for the server space.
I just want cheap SBCs, lots of RAM, access to newer ARM revisions and NVMe everywhere. Oh and ECC stuff baked in like with the CM4. Linus did a rant on that topic too. 😊
What a lot of consumers would love: ARM 2-in-1 Tablet-Laptop mini eg Surface Go "Air" using the Surface Go Form Factor and cutting the weight right down to equivalent with iPad Air M1 at about ~450g + 250g typecover detachable to easily use for media consumption as well as full-fat OS for on-the-go work tinkering. The weight, multi-modal input, convergence of devices and connectivity, long arm battery life are all essential. The fact Apple does not offer this is a market niche waiting to be exploited.
In the capacity of lighter, thinner and longer-lasting battery life (power efficiency) this is where ARM can make immediate gains over Intel/AMD as per Smart Phones already.
Windows On Arm (WOA) has some way to go to match MacOS integration with hardware-OS-Apps which is a challenge also.
In respect to the above, Linux could be more efficient however a lot more work is needed on Touch GUI in Linux for the above convergence.
Love it. Arm device is really efficient and powerful at the same time. Please make it to the mass. We need it.
Macs really aren’t that expensive. I bought the M1 Air on sale for just $799
the thing we need is more non apple arm chips with that level of grunt to perform like a laptop. personally the $850 refurbished m1 air is a amazing deal now for what you get in a laptop I use mine with a 2tb 3.0 nvme drive in my thunderbolt hub with no real penalty on storage speed
I also think that its nice to jump into and out off all the os builds on one device. I run parallels
Hi Gary, i switched from an lenovo thinkpad with archlinux to a mac pro 2021, because i was so impressed from the performance per watt. I tried yabai for the i3 feel but it wasn't the same. Right now i'm okay with macos, because it's an okayish compromise for me, between linux for work and windows for beeing creative and creating music and stuff. But deep in my heart i'm missing linux and i would love to have arch bare metal on my mac.
I am very surprised that Apple actually allow another OS to be installed on their hardware and haven't found a way to prevent this.
They don't have to prevent it, they just have to NOT open their system and let them properly support it.
Don't get up in the few normies. The majority of people will not buy a laptop to run an OS that is not officially supported in it. If you do that, you are up *AT ANY TIME* for your PC to stop working, either at some part or completely. So yeah, Apple just doesn't care.
The new MacBooks are the first time since the 2000s that I have really noticed the performance increase from an upgrade. Upgrades in recent years have always been yeah it’s faster, but these macs are nuts.
You are just a cool Guy. I've always fun to listen to your videos. Because you speak sooo fast. And yoI give so much fundamental information in all aspects about IT SW or Hardware. Other people here wound either have a 10x longer video than yours or then split it into 10 videos. I'm kind of impressed about your visionary ideas here. Congratulation
The advantage of ARM chips is energy efficiency which makes it ideal for laptops. Gamers have different priorities. I don't see the point for a low cost ARM desktop but I like the idea of a serviceable/modular ARM laptop where you can replace graphics, screen, memory, ssd etc. Love your discussions.
I think the ability to reach high performance at low TDP will have gamers interested. Look at how power-hungry the next gen video cards will be. Wouldn't it be nice to have a 90W CPU that performs like an x86 250W TDP CPU? It'll help with heat management and also spare high wattage requirements on your PSU. So... TL;DR I think gamers could be interested, if high-performance low-TDP chips were available.
@@vinnytube1001 you have a point. But, a RISC may not always beat a CISC. e.g. my raspberry pi 4 generate more heat than a Intel NUC i3.
In terms of performance that sounds about right. ARM is generally more efficient by not needing such a large decoder, but high performance CPUs translate to micro-ops anyway, so they're more similar than different. This should mean x86/64 would only be slightly behind ARM on the desktop. (I could be wrong, of course.)
I'd still like to see ARM on desktops so developers can more easily support it. But I'd rather see RISC-V. Not for any particular technical reasons. I just find it appealing and I like what it stands for. If I make a homebrew CPU, emulator, or FPGA project using RISC-V (might do someday for fun), I'm protected against attack by lawyers. That's no small thing. They're the thugs that destroy projects, companies, and lives. They steal money, get people imprisoned, suppress innovation, and generally just create fear and misery. That's not a problem for enthusiasts of RISC-V.
It's better with ARM these days because RISC-V forced them to be better, but they're still in it for the money and protected by law.
@@JB52520 That's a good point. ARM instruction set has grown to be more CISC-y, and x86 processors translate to an internal instruction set anyway. The cost of those translators is estimated to be 3-5% in modern CPUs. But... not only not paying that cost, but also freeing up die space for other things, is definitely an advantage.
"ARM instruction set has grown to be more CISC-y" could you clarify that? AArch64 is a clean, modern, efficient 64-bit ISA.
The M1 Mac Mini is not upgradeable, but I bought a new base model (8 GB RAM & 256 GB storage) for $620 ($570 + sales tax) at Costco in the U.S.. I would have liked more RAM, but I still thought it was a pretty good deal. Next year we'll have more ARM-based Windows & Linux PC's. Thanks for the video!
so if your very skilled at soldering you *can* upgrade it people have upgraded by SSD and RAM on these devices but these tend to be shops that already are used to doing this to phones.
I currently run debian and archlinux on a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Using Samsung Dex to display on the monitor, Termux to install the repos, and packages,(Andronix helps with this), a VNC viewer that is compatible with Dex (MultiVNC), and the XFCE4 desktop environment. It took a little trial and error, but I've installed debian, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Kali, Fedora, and Manjaro. Mostly with XFCE4 and LXDE. I am absolutely NOT a Linux expert, especially when trying to install and run it on devices other than PCs. I'm not a programmer, and grew up with Windows.
Be Advised, you need to get Termux from F-Droid, and not the play store. Everything else can be downloaded from Google Play. The Termux version from play store won't work.
As if Apple will support open source initiative. Anytime Apple wishes, it could block any 3rd party OS from being installed in a multi-boot config. I have MBP 16 2019 and I cannot find a safe way to properly multi-boot with the T2 chip security enforced. The possibility of bricking your Apple computer is always there.
And for those system developers (Java, Javascript, Python, etc.) saying they are X times more productive in Mac than in PC, well dream on. I am one of those hoping back then when I bought my 3000 USD MBP16.
Also, for me x86 is still a better option if supporting old versions (5+ yrs old) of developed software or currently developing for cloud deployment. For the cloud it is better to have a dev machine as close to your cloud server which are majority in x86 CPU.
Incredible. I would have expected Linus Torvalds to switch to something like Thinkpad X13s.
I got my MBA M1 for frontend and App development and I am loving it for battery life and lightness but have had few issues with it here and there with development.
Sub-$500 ARM Linux laptops are sold all over the place. They are called "Chromebooks".
Personally I think it was a brilliant move on Linus' part to announce this. It's a win-win situation. Wink wink nudge nudge. Apple gets some free publicity, maybe someone at apple will look into that GPU problem and make some contributions. Everybody wins. Except Nvidia, Intel and AMD :D
Apple is being asked to enter into a very select club, and mind you, by the head hancho. On the front door. Thing is, linux devs don't need help figuring out the cpu, the memory, the peripherals. Power management was somewhat complicated, but other then that, GPU will be the hardest problem to crack. On the other hand, Apple has no reason to hold back, because it is not competing directly with Nvidia or AMD in that space yet, but it could sell a lot more hardware if people were just comfortable putting linux on it and playing stuff. They been kinda ambivalent about it. About people running their OS on other hardware, and people running other OSes on their hardware. All the big kids are doing it (contributing to linux kernel)... why not apple?
So IF you indeed create the absolutely greatest M2-specific Linux-ARM-app, with getting THE MOST out of that silicon, and their CPU, GPU, Thunderbolt, etc. WHO do you want to sell it to? Apple is already a SMALLER fraction of all PCs, M2 is an even smaller fraction of that, and then THOSE who have the urge to convert their M2 to Linux should be an abysmally small market. Weird thinking. And it won't even be on the Appstore.
I don't remember saying that these Arm based machines need to run Linux specifically. Yes that is what Linus wants, but that isn't going to be a commercial success, is it. We need high performance, yet better priced, Arm based laptops and desktops to run Linux, Windows, and Chrome OS.
Gary, I really miss the Speed Test G tests, I know that you think that Speed Test G videos weren't that popular but I think if you give some time to it, Speed Test G can overtake Geekbench in popularity.
I like your enthusiasm. But I gave it two years and it wasn't growing.
Been waiting for a drop! Now I understand it may never come back. 😭
Absolutely this. Torvalds is almost always ahead of the game when it comes to technical leadership and x86 has been really limiting for a long time. Just the fact that platform relies on proprietary BIOS firmware essentially unchanged since 1979 is pretty indicative of where x86 stands.
I've used both the Apple machines and distros of Linux and keep going back to my LG 16" Gram since it is so light and powerful. Most of the things I want to do with my 3 computers are easily done on this machine and I don't want to spend the time and effort to learn a new OS. I believe most folks feel this way and specialist users have their os of their choice and we are all happy.
Just install Linux on your LG Gram then? Or dual boot?
Only 32b arm has full register multi-stacks with the stm/ldm commands. Great for npu memory and interm conclusion processing.💓👽😇,jpk
The biggest difficulty in developing Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon Macs is that the Apple Silicon Macs are completely proprietary systems with no information published by Apple on how the internals work and operate. As a result the difficulty for Asahi Linux developers is that they have to completely reverse engineer Apple Silicon to develop proper drivers for all the hardware. One of the toughest parts is the Apple Silicon GPUs. Right now Asahi Linux lacks GPU acceleration and the Asahi Linux development team are still hard at work develop GPU acceleration.
I bought a brand new on sale $100 Chromebook, was not sure why it was cheap when I bought it.Turns out it's a 64bit ARM. ChromeOS is 32bit but Linux dev env VM is 64bit. There are some compatability issues but not a big deal. The biggest surprise is that the battery last a long time and usually don't have to charge the whole day. I can use it as a light dev machine and just remote desktop to home computer for more demanding dev coding. So it has been a great experience. Another benefit, I don't have to worry if it gets stolen when I leave it to go to the bathroom. I call it disposable computer.
Maybe it'll happen one day, but I don't see it happening any time soon because of the lack of backward compatibility. Most consumers just don't care about Intel vs. ARM. They just want a computer that runs the programs they already have. As a result, the market for this sort of thing is too small for hardware manufacturers to want to produce ARM laptops in large enough quantities for the price to come down.
Only scenarios I've seen in the wild are low-end Chromebooks. Who knows, maybe once the Framework platform matures, we might see new board options for ARM and RISC-V
If Qualcomm or Samsung manage to make a comparable chip to M1 then it would be a great opportunity for Linux to emerge as a solid desktop alternative for the masses. Dell/HP or any other major PC manufacturer will have to use Linux if they want to compete with Apple as Windows sucks ass on Arm!
So you don't know about nuvia coming from Qualcomm?
for Qualcomm or Samsung to get somthing competitive to M1 they would need to spend a LOT more on R&D so the chip cost would cost a LOT more.
In the sort term apple movieg to arm will mean the margin they are making on each Mac is lower as they have put a massive R&D spend into this migration.
@patrickchinka Are you referring to the Grace and Hopper superchips? I don't think that will come to laptops or desktops. Those are server products.
if you want a cheap consumer ready arm laptop you should check what pine64 has. its pretty good and has been used by many.
Old processor with only Cortex-A53/A72. Barely faster than a Raspberry Pi.
I want a Linux tablet, non aple/android OS. Totally free of bloating junkware perpetually running, consuming precious clock cycles...
I've had a Linux ARM64 laptop for a long time. A Chromebook. I also have a Chromebox for a desktop. The built-in Debian Linux environment is great too for console apps and X apps
Absolutely agree with you concerning the need for ARM laptop/desktop computers. With the greater efficiency of ARM over the ancient X86 architecture, ARM could be a way to get more performance with less watts and heat. High end discreet graphics cards are an example of X86 stupidity, consuming ever greater amounts of energy for just a little bit more performance. Theoretically with ARM, a more efficient CPU coupled with high bandwidth onboard graphics could provide even better performance with a fraction of the wattage, heat, and price.
ARM processors for PCs are presently made for servers. Not cheap but lots of power. I think manufacturers will soon see there is a gap in the market lower down. They are always better for power consumption and consumers are more worried now about rising bills.
I'd welcome an ARM-based desktop PC if it's powerful enough and absolutely not sporting an Apple logo.
Apple M chips/hardware may be a chance for the linux community = less hardware to support = focusing on user experience/simplicity + longevity of support in bonus !
Super video
Thanks
This is very cool, and feeling safer going to M1/2 when replacing my 2015 macbook pro (running linux). And I guess it will help the progress that the head honcho is running your distro too.
RK3588 is sold with mini-itx boards, but still the graphic driver seems to be a problem....
Yes, but the Cortex A76 is quite old now, it was used in flagship smartphones in 2019.
GARY!!!
Good morning Professor!
Good morning fellow classmates!
Stay safe out there everyone!
MARK!!!!
It's probably because Arm Windows hasn't caught up. The cheapest fastest devices are smartphones/tablets. Orange Pi 5 is not bad, but mobile development is leapfrogging.
Watching on the M1
WHY doesn't he use MacOX ? On a MAC he does not even need Linux. So much for my stupid comment of the day....
Can't wait for RISC-V's turn!
Why? What advantages will it bring?
Don't you understand that arm64 processors are SoC - system on a chip, that means that RAM, GPU and CPU as well as handful of other things like modem, neural engine, etc. are all embedded into the chip and this contributes to its efficiency and performance, that means no swappable parts, best you can hope for are SSD, but not with Apple though.
LOL, it isn't the fact that the CPU is part of an SoC that makes it efficient. It is the CPU design that makes it efficient. Also, Arm's server CPUs in its Neoverse range are also more efficient than the Intel and Amd counterparts that is why Google, Amazon, and Microsoft now offer them in their cloud services.
Unfortunately I don't like the way manufacturers limit upgradeability
Just buy a single board computer w/ arm.
Plenty out there.I dont see the demand for ARM PC. Why when u have x86 soooo cheap.
Looking forward to his expected rant in a couple of months about the ARM64 situation.
sadly there are some applications that do not work on Linux, which I use at the moment. When there will be support for them I will jump straight in.
Torvaulds invented the Linux KERNEL, not an O/S.
The O/S to which you refer, is the GNU OS, of which Richard Stallman is the founder.
😂 no. In fact I have a whole video about why you are wrong.
“There’s no technical reason why you can’t do this!” 👍 So much this. Make it. People will buy it! Or at least I shall.
thing is i want a machine can do it all so that is why unless game creators make games run on ARM chips as well as x86, i wun be going ARM at least on the desktop space? also i like to assemble my own system not be locked in into X RAM only or Y class GPU for the hardware (SOC)
Oh, what i would give to see a technical talk headlined by Linus Torvalds and Johny Srouji…
One point tho, you say we need an arm pc with slotted ram,gpu and ssd, but the Mac machines have ran and gpu baked in, and even the ssd is special. I'm sure we're getting there (raspi gpu support already a thing), I'm just pointing this out
True. But the reason why the PC has been successful over the decades is its modular approach. We need that, not more custom built computers where nothing is upgradable.
@@GaryExplains i totally agree. Just pointing it out. I've been bothering my friend for the last decade about why phones don't come with sockets for CPUs, I'm sure he's tired of it (i know why, but still)
But cheap ARM laptops do exist, namely certain models of chromebooks
The problem that Linus stated many years about the Arm architecture is that every SoC is customized to the extent that the Linux kernel has to be customized for every single SoC chip. This is in stark contrast to the x86 side where you just add support for a new CPU, chipset, GPU -- easy peasy. For example, Linux critics complain about the proliferation of many different Linux distributions as compared with the uniformity of Windows and the Win32 API. (bad Linux, good Windows) In this case, the Arm community is hurting itself by having too many choices out there. In order for Arm to "grow up", Arm needs to copy what IBM did in '84 -- standard CPU socket, chipsets (not really needed in Arm), and standard PC card slots. Until then, Arm will continue to be a hodgepodge.
Arm now has standards, called System Ready. It is growing in popularity, especially in the server space. Ultimately it will also be popular in the PC space but so far neither Apple or Qualcomm/Microsoft have adopted it.
I want to ask you a question and I hope you read this and answer me. Why can’t we make use of android tablets to install linux especially when they are available everywhere, cheap, some have have strong hardware and their operating systems update for no more than two years. This might help too many people find suitable pc (like) machines easily.
Im doing baremetal M1 mabook air m1 16gb ram i built and a snapdragon thinkpad x13s 16gb ram baremetal...both are beasts
2024 I wonder if he keeps using it
I'm puzzled by this. Maybe I am mistaken, but there are tons of ARM based chromebooks out there. I assume some can have unlocked bootloaders and dev modes, and would be *at* least as viable for Linux usage as the Mac which has required the ASAHI linux bods to put in a lot of work, and I suspect that on that Mac you'll have a more limited choice care of that.
I will agree that most of those come with limited upgradability - soldered ram and so on. So that remains an issue (but again, mac books = same problem at a much greater price).
The processors in Chromebooks tend to be quite low end.
I remember yellow dog. Don't know why I remember it. But I do.
Microsoft has intentions to use arm processors, China has written software that can most probably employ the M1 or M2 technology
this is good news now if arm chip architects would make a serious desktop or laptop offering other then microsoft and snapdragons bespoke surface arm chips we could possibly see the arm pc landscape boom
The problem is that the only viable way for that to happen would be for Windows to get into it seriously... Because I don't think Linux is going to get the the numbers for the hardware companies to invest in the development of what we need... It's a shame that Microsoft tried to do it when ARM was not on par with x86 performance.
Thinkpad launched an Arm based laptop, albeit a bit overpriced. The Pi400 is a great Arm desktop machine for under 100 bucks. In fact I don't understand why the Pi400 is not a bigger success, it is IMO potentially the home computer of the 2020's, 40 years after the C64.
great video
I dont feel that good about "moving away from x86" going from proprietary to proprietary like switching from water to H2O, we should be doing work on Risc-V
Why? Are you planning on designing a chip at any time soon. You understand that all RISC-V designs are proprietary by default. There is nothing magic in RISC-V that makes the chips any less proprietary.
@@GaryExplains Using Risc-V to make a open source chip ffs, its not like companies havent sponsored open source projects before
@@GaryExplains and tbh, may be a long road there but i sure plan on designing chips in the future
It costs hundred's of millions to design, make, and sell a competitive CPU. There is no way a company would invest all that, just to give it away. Please be realistic. Hardware isn't like software.
I’d LOVE a generic ARM64 desktop / motherboard.
Me too