System76 Preparing To Roll Out Their First Coreboot-Enabled Laptop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: System76 Preparing To Roll Out Their First Coreboot-Enabled Laptop

System76 has been making good strides on their Coreboot support for their hardware and they are now readying a System76 Darter Pro OSFC Edition as their apparent first laptop to ship with Coreboot in place of the proprietary BIOS...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=System76-Darter-Pro-OSFC

[Guest]

It's sad that these ship with low-end Intel chips that will get slower with every coming month.

Where are mobile Threadrippers or EPYC chips? I feel like the mobile workstation market is ignored.

[uid313]

With rumors about Apple making laptops based on the ARM architecture, and Samsung making Galaxy Book S which is based on the ARM architecture with Windows 10, I wonder how long until other manufacturers such as maybe System76 start with ARM-based laptops and workstations.

[Vistaus]

With rumors about Apple making laptops based on the ARM architecture, and Samsung making Galaxy Book S which is based on the ARM architecture with Windows 10, I wonder how long until other manufacturers such as maybe System76 start with ARM-based laptops and workstations.

Microsoft tried and failed with the Surface RT. MICROSOFT. If they can't do it, then I fail to see how others will make them popular (bar Apple, as they have a specific set of customers *and* tighter app system).

[uid313]

Microsoft tried and failed with the Surface RT. MICROSOFT. If they can't do it, then I fail to see how others will make them popular (bar Apple, as they have a specific set of customers *and* tighter app system).

Microsoft was never a major hardware player like Dell and HP. Microsoft with their Surface RT attempt was a long time ago, on the ARMv7, since then ARM have matured a lot with ARMv8, and is much more performant.

Google and others have been pretty successful with ARM-based Chromebooks.

Now with Microsoft having Windows 10 on ARM there is nothing stopping vendors from making ARM-based Windows 10 computers, or even ARM-based Linux computers. Intel offers 9 hours battery time while Samsung on their Galaxy Book S offers 24 hours battery time.
The ARMv8 architecture being much cleaner than x86-64 have the potential for higher instruction per clock cycle. So then you have computers with better battery and faster performance, then that is appealing.

[Vistaus]

Microsoft was never a major hardware player like Dell and HP. Microsoft with their Surface RT attempt was a long time ago, on the ARMv7, since then ARM have matured a lot with ARMv8, and is much more performant.

Google and others have been pretty successful with ARM-based Chromebooks.

Now with Microsoft having Windows 10 on ARM there is nothing stopping vendors from making ARM-based Windows 10 computers, or even ARM-based Linux computers. Intel offers 9 hours battery time while Samsung on their Galaxy Book S offers 24 hours battery time.
The ARMv8 architecture being much cleaner than x86-64 have the potential for higher instruction per clock cycle. So then you have computers with better battery and faster performance, then that is appealing.

First off: the RT had great performance.

But regarding current tech: ChromeOS has a different target audience and is waaaay different from Windows. So you can't say that just because ChromeOS is popular on ARM Chromebooks Windows 10 will be too.

[edwaleni]

It's sad that these ship with low-end Intel chips that will get slower with every coming month.

Where are mobile Threadrippers or EPYC chips? I feel like the mobile workstation market is ignored.

The best you are going to get is the Ryzen Embedded for now for anything outside of the desktop/server metaphor for AMD.

https://youtu.be/8DINmS5YBD4

AMD is pursuing the enterprise laptop market with the Mobile A10. Mobile workstation is too niche for them I would imagine.

To my chagrin, many mainline manufacturers plunk a discrete graphics card in any ole PC and call it a "workstation".

Lenovo still makes the P Series of mobile workstations.

The P1 Gen 2 is supposed to come with a 9th Gen Xeon, but at the moment only a Core 7 is available.

[mmstick]

It's sad that these ship with low-end Intel chips that will get slower with every coming month.

I wouldn't call the i7-8565U low-end.

Where are mobile Threadrippers or EPYC chips? I feel like the mobile workstation market is ignored.

It's more that Intel offers more support in this space. AMD would have to convince Clevo (ODM) to design mainboards and chassis options with their processors. Then System76 (OEM) would be able to provide AMD as an option.

[Guest]

I wouldn't call the i7-8565U low-end.

The TDP is only 15W, and considering the range of frequencies it supposedly runs at, I assume it overheats pretty quickly. This is an ULV quadcore, not even a hex core chip, which Intel makes these days. It's a higher bin of your average modern mobile quadcore.

I am deeply disappointed by the state mobile chips are in, and I wish manufacturers would bother to release something decent for people who want to not be bound by their hardware they can easily carry around. Compiling scales nicely, and can use as much power as you can throw at it, video encoding is quite similar as well, and hardware encoding stands no chance against software.

[uid313]

Slower performance. As an example, software decoding a 1080p video takes all my 4 cores on ARM (and they're pretty fast ones), while only taking 1 core under x86 at the same clock speed.

As far as I know, all the mobile phones got hardware-accelerated decoding of video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_systems-on-chip#Hardware_codec_supported