arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
ARM chips aren’t better at power efficiency compared to x84 above 10 or 15W or so. Apple is getting a lot out of them because TSMC 3nm; even the upcoming AMD 9000 series will only be on TSMC 4nm.
ARM is great for having more than one competent company in the market, though.
If you look at pfsense/OPNsense hardware recommendations, it’s almost all using chips like the Intel N5105 (10W TDP, though admittedly “TDP” is itself a messy term) or J4125 (also 10W TDP). Using ARM hardware is asked a lot in the community forums, and it’s one of those questions that will get you a flamed for not checking Google first. The power usage benefits for switching to ARM just aren’t there.
There is the Netgate 1100, which runs ARM on a proprietary build of pfsense. The community has largely ignored it in favor of Intel chips. There isn’t much of a price advantage, and the performance is lackluster.
That said, there’s lots that you can do with a sub-10W chip, and x86 has nothing modern there.
Personally, I cobbled together an OPNsense firewall out of some old desktop parts I had on hand. Power usage is a bit higher, but not so much that I care. I would like a more viable high-end ARM option, though, just because I don’t want x86 to be the only option.
Extrapolating the specific use case of pfsense routers to all other applications seems misleading, especially when arm laptops and servers exist that prove their utility and power savings for their use cases. It seems to be the case that there isn’t a particular arm device that is priced well and well suited for pfsense, which does have somewhat unusual requirements compared to other applications.
As long as the apps all work. So much stuff is browser based now, but something will always turns up that doesn’t work. Something like mandatory timesheet software, a bespoke tool etc.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
Apparently (from another comment on a thread about arm from a few weeks ago) consumer GPU bioses contain some x86 instructions that get run on the CPU, so getting full support for ARM isn’t as simple as swapping the cards over to a new motherboard. There are ways to hack around it (some people got AMD GPUs booting on a raspberry pi 5 using its PCIe lanes with a bunch of adapters) but it is pretty unreliable.
Yeah, there are some software issues that need to be resolved, but the bigger issue AFAIK is having the hardware to handle it. The few ARM devices with a PCIe slot often don’t fully implement the spec, such as power delivery. Because of that, driver work just doesn’t happen, because nobody can realistically use it.
If they provide a proper PCIe slot (8-16 lanes, on-spec power delivery, etc), getting the drivers updated should be relatively easy (months, not years).
RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).
I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.
Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.
GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.
For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.
Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.
ARM is only more power efficient below 10 to 15 W or so. Above that, doesn’t matter much between ARM and x86.
The real benefit is somewhat abstract. Only two companies can make x86, and only one of them knows how to do it well. ARM (and RISC V) opens up the market to more players.
Kinda? It really should be treated as a 1st generation product for Windows (because the previous versions were ignored by, well, everyone because they were utterly worthless), and should be avoided for quite a while if gaming is remotely your goal. It’s probably the future, but the future is later… assuming, of course, that the next gen x86 CPUs don’t both get faster and lower power (which they are) and thus eliminate the entire benefit of ARM.
And, if you DONT use Windows, you’re looking at a couple of months to a year to get all the drivers in the Linux kernel, then the kernel with the drivers into mainstream distributions, assuming Qualcomm doesn’t do their usual thing of just abandoning support six months in because they want you to buy the next release of their chips instead.
I’m having the same dream, but I don’t trust Qualcomm to not fuck everyone. I mean it’d be nice if they don’t but they’ve certainly got the history of being the scorpion and I’m going to let someone else be the frog until they’ve proven they’re not going to sting me mid-river.
Because optimization isn’t secondary or even tertiary to the average modern design philosophy. The extra power is, unfortunately, mandatory for a decent user experience.
ARM looking pretty good too these days
arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
ARM chips aren’t better at power efficiency compared to x84 above 10 or 15W or so. Apple is getting a lot out of them because TSMC 3nm; even the upcoming AMD 9000 series will only be on TSMC 4nm.
ARM is great for having more than one competent company in the market, though.
Do you have a source for that? It seems a bit hard to believe.
If you look at pfsense/OPNsense hardware recommendations, it’s almost all using chips like the Intel N5105 (10W TDP, though admittedly “TDP” is itself a messy term) or J4125 (also 10W TDP). Using ARM hardware is asked a lot in the community forums, and it’s one of those questions that will get you a flamed for not checking Google first. The power usage benefits for switching to ARM just aren’t there.
There is the Netgate 1100, which runs ARM on a proprietary build of pfsense. The community has largely ignored it in favor of Intel chips. There isn’t much of a price advantage, and the performance is lackluster.
That said, there’s lots that you can do with a sub-10W chip, and x86 has nothing modern there.
Personally, I cobbled together an OPNsense firewall out of some old desktop parts I had on hand. Power usage is a bit higher, but not so much that I care. I would like a more viable high-end ARM option, though, just because I don’t want x86 to be the only option.
Extrapolating the specific use case of pfsense routers to all other applications seems misleading, especially when arm laptops and servers exist that prove their utility and power savings for their use cases. It seems to be the case that there isn’t a particular arm device that is priced well and well suited for pfsense, which does have somewhat unusual requirements compared to other applications.
As long as the apps all work. So much stuff is browser based now, but something will always turns up that doesn’t work. Something like mandatory timesheet software, a bespoke tool etc.
But isn’t there x86 emulation for those edge cases?
Depends if you trust it to actually work.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.
Apparently (from another comment on a thread about arm from a few weeks ago) consumer GPU bioses contain some x86 instructions that get run on the CPU, so getting full support for ARM isn’t as simple as swapping the cards over to a new motherboard. There are ways to hack around it (some people got AMD GPUs booting on a raspberry pi 5 using its PCIe lanes with a bunch of adapters) but it is pretty unreliable.
Yeah, there are some software issues that need to be resolved, but the bigger issue AFAIK is having the hardware to handle it. The few ARM devices with a PCIe slot often don’t fully implement the spec, such as power delivery. Because of that, driver work just doesn’t happen, because nobody can realistically use it.
If they provide a proper PCIe slot (8-16 lanes, on-spec power delivery, etc), getting the drivers updated should be relatively easy (months, not years).
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RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).
I’ll take that as well please.
It’s not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won’t be too much longer.
I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.
Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.
GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.
For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.
Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.
hmm. not really. I can’t beat AMD. Only in power-consumption, sure, but not in real performance.
This is where I need it to beat the others
even then, strix will look to compete with apple silicon in perf/watt
I need to have a look at that. Thanks!
ARM is only more power efficient below 10 to 15 W or so. Above that, doesn’t matter much between ARM and x86.
The real benefit is somewhat abstract. Only two companies can make x86, and only one of them knows how to do it well. ARM (and RISC V) opens up the market to more players.
technically 3, VIA still has a x86 license, they just don’t do consumer parts.
For real?
Kinda? It really should be treated as a 1st generation product for Windows (because the previous versions were ignored by, well, everyone because they were utterly worthless), and should be avoided for quite a while if gaming is remotely your goal. It’s probably the future, but the future is later… assuming, of course, that the next gen x86 CPUs don’t both get faster and lower power (which they are) and thus eliminate the entire benefit of ARM.
And, if you DONT use Windows, you’re looking at a couple of months to a year to get all the drivers in the Linux kernel, then the kernel with the drivers into mainstream distributions, assuming Qualcomm doesn’t do their usual thing of just abandoning support six months in because they want you to buy the next release of their chips instead.
Windows is dead to me. Arm Linux would be a wet dream
I’m having the same dream, but I don’t trust Qualcomm to not fuck everyone. I mean it’d be nice if they don’t but they’ve certainly got the history of being the scorpion and I’m going to let someone else be the frog until they’ve proven they’re not going to sting me mid-river.
No.
Why?
Because optimization isn’t secondary or even tertiary to the average modern design philosophy. The extra power is, unfortunately, mandatory for a decent user experience.
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Not really