System76 To Explore Offering High-End ARM Linux Laptops / Desktops

[pracedru]

This is very interesting.
I would buy one if it comes with an international keyboard.

[Britoid]

The UEFI support should solve that. Hopefully, we'll see that in the next RPi as well.

I hope. I think there's a third party UEFI bootloader for the Pi already.

My hope is eventually Android phones start using UEFI and would help the way to one image for all Android devices.

[audir8]

You can get your 15hr battery life, or you can get performance. I think all the server ARM processors over the last couple of year have pretty much shown this to be true. RISC's code density isn't as good as CISC and this matters at higher frequencies. RISC-V isn't too much better at this, but it is open - and you can design your own core: https://scs.sifive.com/core-designer/ You can fix RISC's problems by throwing enough memory bandwidth at it (POWER), or become more CISC-like (ARM), but either way, you probably won't beat Intel or AMD in perf/watt/dollar above a mid-level Laptop's power budget.

Companies like System76 and Purism need to start partnering with SiFive and start making tablets/phones/Rpis with RISC-V in them. RISC-V says they've shipped 140m cores, their Linux cores work with AMD GPUs, and they're working on vector instructions. As soon as they have vector instructions, no reason why there couldn't be a viable tablet/laptop with an AMD GPU. There could be one right now, and the higher price would actually go towards something other than ARM licensing fees.

Went to https://sifivetechsymposium.com/ and saw some cool demos (full-fledged debian - supertuxkart - running on and AMD GPU+RISC-V), they're also working on a HBM2 RISC-V chip for a customer.

[jbowen]

I'd love a powerful ARM laptop, preferably with serviceable SO-DIMM and M.2 slots.

I haven't looked at System76 too much for x86 hardware but I definitely would if they had a good ARM offering (or eventually RISC-V).

[andreano]

Feature request: Suspend to RAM.

Why is that never supported on ARM?

[edwaleni]

I like the idea of building the AArch64 ecosystem, but as a daily driver, I ran into a issues with my Ubuntu on ARM.

[ThoreauHD]

This is like Jumbo Shrimp. It ain't gonna happen.

[HadrienG]

I'm not sure if I get why people are so excited about ARM laptops for Linux use. Sure, Intel can always use more competition... but as far as I'm concerned, experiencing NVidia driver breakages on every other major kernel release is already bad enough, and I can't really feel positively about the prospect of having an entire SoC worth of proprietary and / or poorly maintained drivers on my hands

[fazalmajid]

I'd love this, and a RISC-V version as well. Most machines available to Linux on ARM developers are SBCs with wimpy 2012 smartphone-equivalent. If we could get something more current like a Snapdragon 855 or a HiSilicon (Huawei) Kirin 970/980, it would be a perfectly respectable machine. Of course, the price would be closer to the $1000 of the typical laptop than the $200 of a Pinebook Pro.

[wizard69]

I'm not sure if I get why people are so excited about ARM laptops for Linux use.

Lots of good reasons frankly. For one your performance per watt is excellent. You have a significant advantage in cores available. There is a much hire potential for innovation with ARM based systems. Always on hardware that doesn’t cost a fortune to run

Sure, Intel can always use more competition... but as far as I'm concerned, experiencing NVidia driver breakages on every other major kernel release is already bad enough,

.
There is always the possibility that things might be better if you stay away from NVIDIA. In fact NVIDIA and Linux is a bit of a foolish endeavor, we could hope for a bit better support from ARM. However one has to expect teething pains but those pains means we are moving forward

and I can't really feel positively about the prospect of having an entire SoC worth of proprietary and / or poorly maintained drivers on my hands

Well I really doubt that System 76 would go that route. However I’d be the first to agree that ARM has screwed up significantly in not offering ready To run chip designs that are easy to buy. I’m actually hoping that SoftBank can influence ARM in a positive way that would result in more standard solutions. To put it simply there are a lot of custom ARM designs out there but none of them optimal for the PC industry. Since no design team has stepped up to build such a chip, ARM needs to prime the market.

Frankly im not sure why you wouldn’t want an ARM based machine. ARM is pretty much the future of computing. As a developer it is hard to beat cores.