Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 M1 Brings Improvements For Apple Silicon M1, Altra + More

[Jumbotron]

The Age of ARM is here...and not just with Apple.

Snippets from an article from one of the leading ChromeOS blogs, Chromeunboxed.

" This week, MediaTek announced a whole bunch of stuff at their annual summit, but buried right in the middle of everything they spoke of, there were 2 new chips officially announced that will be added to the current MediaTek SoC (the MT8183 currently on display in the Lenovo Chromebook Duet and a few others) to round out MediaTek’s Chromebook offerings. Gabriel posted about this announcement on Tuesday if you’d like the overall breakdown on those two new chips – the MT8192 and MT8195 – but
for today, we want to talk about why these chips are important moving forward.

Though there are differences in chips with the same Cortex cores, they aren’t wildly different. In a side-by-side of Cortex-A76 chips from MediaTek and Qualcomm, there’s only a 7% performance gain in Qualcomm’s chip and some of that can be chalked up to the 7nm process in the Snapdragon 855 versus MediaTek’s 12nm in the Helio G90. With these new Chromebook chips from MediaTek being 7nm (MT8192) and 6nm (MT8195) processes, that won’t be nearly as much of a gap.

These new ARM chips from MediaTek will only make that experience better and better as seen with little updates to games like PUBG Mobile for Chromebooks with MediaTek ARM chips inside. Where we see this game still struggle on far more powerful Intel-powered Chromebooks, it runs quite well on even the under-powered Lenovo Chromebook Duet. There’s no question about it: Android apps work much better on ARM-powered Chromebooks.

Now that we have Qualcomm taking their first dive into the Chromebook waters and MediaTek clearly ready to step fully into the market with their best hardware foot forward, I think the shift to ARM is truly beginning for Chrome OS. Will Google – like Apple – go all in on ARM and leave Intel by the wayside? Not any time soon, if ever. Instead, Chrome OS is an operating system that is flexible enough to handle both ARM and x86 natively without emulators, allowing the user to choose what is more important to them in a device. If absolute power is the goal, you’re likely going to be in the Intel camp for some time. If thin, light, silent, long-lasting Chromebooks that run Android apps like a champ are more your speed, hold on just a bit longer. The ARM revolution is coming for Chromebooks in 2021, starting with MediaTek, and we’re in for a very interesting ride. "

https://chromeunboxed.com/mediatek-arm-chips-chromebooks-mt8192-mt8195

[edwaleni]

Every major Linux program should have a crash program to port over to ARM, like yesterday. LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Openshot, Ardour, Blender, Skrooge, KMymoney, GNUCash, etc, etc.

Pick 3 platforms. One with straight ARM with Mail graphics. One with a recent Qualcomm SoC and one with a Mediatek SoC.

Make sure they are all touch aware and scale and resize properly when reoriented. Make sure they take advantage of any built in DSPs, Neural Processors, Visual Processors, GPS, Advanced Matrix Math processors if any, etc. etc.

Make versions of all of these apps, ( well...Blender maybe not..) that are phone friendly and optimized.

In other words....Get a Chromebook tablet, a Microsoft Surface, a Lenovo Duet, a Samsung Chromebook, an Acer Chromebook tablet and or laptop, A Rasperberry Pi and start hacking away.

There should be an ARM native version of EVERY major Linux app out there right along side their original x86 versions. And each and everyone should take advantage of every AI, ML, and DSP accelerated core on each SoC mentioned above.

In other words...every FOSS project should now begin with ARM and only THEN work out an x86 version.

Looking forward to seeing your contributions to all of these FOSS projects in the near future supporting the transition to ARM. It is pretty cool when you lead by example.

[MadCatX]

Every major Linux program should have a crash program to port over to ARM, like yesterday. LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Openshot, Ardour, Blender, Skrooge, KMymoney, GNUCash, etc, etc.

I just checked ALARM's package repository and literally every app that you just mentioned is there, plus a few others that would be relevant the kind of work I do on my machines. Inadequate software support is the least of concern for desktop Linux. The real issue is the quite closed and less standardized nature of the current ARM landscape where each SoC is a machine of its own. If ARM for PCs ever happens, Linux may have trouble keeping up with the ever emerging new ARM boards.

[MadeUpName]

Every major Linux program should have a crash program to port over to ARM, like yesterday.

Call me when the governments, banks, insurance companies etc port all their applications over to ARM. Lots of them haven't moved off of OS/2 or Fortran yet.

[creoflux]

Looking forward to seeing your contributions to all of these FOSS projects in the near future supporting the transition to ARM. It is pretty cool when you lead by example.

Missed opportunity for dad joke usage of the term 'ARMchair revolutionary'

[Jumbotron]

Call me when the governments, banks, insurance companies etc port all their applications over to ARM. Lots of them haven't moved off of OS/2 or Fortran yet.

Uhhh....you do know they're all making moves of some sort into the various clouds, where ARM is becoming dominant? AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure....etc., all having made or are making custom silicon ARM cores.

Also there are no banking apps made for x86. I bank with 5 different banks. 1 Global, 2 National, 1 Regional and 1 local Credit Union. Each and every one are solely Web apps and Android and iOS.

x86 is now worthless for 99.95% of consumers' needs. It is becoming increasingly burdensome and restrictive for even HPC and Supercomputing needs, particularly if AI and ML are thrown in the mix along with a power budget. And for the few PC gamers left who still perform their masturbatory rites of building out insane game rigs with heat sinks the size of the Tesseract from Avengers and glows just the same, x86 is ALSO becoming less relevant as the largest gaming industry of all time is mobile and now streaming with Stadia, Nvidia's Geforce NOW with fantastic performance even on lowly Chromebooks.

Consider this your call.

[Jumbotron]

From the Fast Company review of the M1 MacBook. Some real world benchmarks.


" Of course if you already have a Mac, the performance difference that matters is the one between your old machine and the new one you might buy. In this household, the old Macs include a 2016 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 chip and a 2018 MacBook Air with a Core i5. Both have 16 GB of RAM, double the quantity in the new Air I’ve been trying.

Using iMovie to save a 74-second 4K video took more than five minutes on the 2018 MacBook Air, and sent its cooling fan into a tizzy.

It took two and a half minutes on the MacBook Pro.

And on the new Air—which, with its efficient M1 chip, doesn’t need a fan—it took just 49 seconds. "


Whole review down below.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90576013...e-silicon-2020

[creoflux]

Also there are no banking apps made for x86. I bank with 5 different banks. 1 Global, 2 National, 1 Regional and 1 local Credit Union. Each and every one are solely Web apps and Android and iOS.

You are only considering the client facing software you interact with in this assessment. There is server and internal software to consider. I agree with the idea that x86 might not be as relevant in the future and I get that you are excited about the performance prospects of other processors but at the current moment x86 is still important. It a certain respect it is somewhat unknowable. People still argue factors that contribute to VHS winning over Beta or Blu-Ray vs HD DVD.

[Jumbotron]

You are only considering the client facing software you interact with in this assessment. There is server and internal software to consider. I agree with the idea that x86 might not be as relevant in the future and I get that you are excited about the performance prospects of other processors but at the current moment x86 is still important. It a certain respect it is somewhat unknowable. People still argue factors that contribute to VHS winning over Beta or Blu-Ray vs HD DVD.

No. You did not read where i said that most of those institutions you mentioned are already moving to the cloud which is increasingly becoming ARM based. Old mainframe Fortran code and OS/2 installs are all running in a VM somewhere on an AWS instance, or Google Cloud instance, or Microsoft Azure instance. Hell...maybe even Oracle as well.

Particularly with the rise of challenger banks in the financial world and having greater client historical insights to make better underwriting decisions on the insurance side, demands a platform that has AI and ML at its very core. Buying instance time at scale in the cloud for a financial firm or insurance firm with that kind of data load and needing 24/7 real time answers and forecasting is becoming more expensive by the day running all that on hot and heavy Epyc or Xeon space heater CPUs and a shit ton of Nvidia GPUs.

These businesses every waking nano second are looking to cut costs. That's why they went to the cloud. Now the x86 clouds are eating into their profit margin again as the Cloud Providers pass along cooling and energy costs to the banks and the insurance agencies and anyone else needing Big Data and Big Cloud.

So.....ARM

Also...don't forget. There is a world's fastest Supercomputer out there. There is also a world's most power efficient computer out there as well. They used to be two separate Supercomputers.

Now they are just one Fujitsu Supercomputer. Running on ARM.

[edwaleni]

Interesting factoid. ARM International was an investor in Ampere. Now that NVidia owns ARM, depending on the deal with Softbank, that means NVidia is now an investor in Ampere.

Which now brings the marketing name of their recent RTX graphics GPU together with the name of the ARM based server company.