It May Soon Be Possible To Build A Do-It-Yourself 64-Bit ARM Laptop

[sverris]

I hope Linus Torvalds is right and it's going to be the year of ARM Laptops.
Dream 2016 Laptop:

• AArch64/ARMv8 SoC: Server-Class 24-48 Cores or based on Tegra X1 or some Qualcomm chip
• 16GB ECC LPDDR4
• NVMe SSD (slideshare)
• (Dell) 4k Touch InfinityEdge Display (able to pack ~17" screen in a typical 15" sized notebook)
• Keyboard with NumPad and TrackPoint
• Running coreboot + mainline kernel
• (personally: Plasma/KWin on Wayland)

Anyone else interested in something like this?

Overkill?

I would be happy with something like the Pi-Top, but somewhat bigger and somewhat faster.

[Nelson]

I hope Linus Torvalds is right and it's going to be the year of ARM Laptops.
Dream 2016 Laptop:

• AArch64/ARMv8 SoC: Server-Class 24-48 Cores or based on Tegra X1 or some Qualcomm chip
• 16GB ECC LPDDR4
• NVMe SSD (slideshare)
• (Dell) 4k Touch InfinityEdge Display (able to pack ~17" screen in a typical 15" sized notebook)
• Keyboard with NumPad and TrackPoint
• Running coreboot + mainline kernel
• (personally: Plasma/KWin on Wayland)

Anyone else interested in something like this?

I'd like that SoC in any form factor. Particularly if it can idle at less than 1watt. Seems a little horsepower heavy for a laptop though.

I suspect that the ARM laptops, for a a good long while, will be 4 or 8 (with big.LITTLE) core type devices that are effectively glorified netbooks with 12+ hours of battery.

[wallacoloo]

I had a pretty decent "DIY laptop" for a few months. I bought an intel NUC (15 W core-i5 w/ hd 6000 graphics) & loaded it with 16 gb ram + a 500 gb SSD.

Then I bought a used motorola lapdock (the same thing people were all using to make raspberry pi laptops a few years ago) and assembled a VESA mount that could be snapped onto the back of it (the NUC has VESA mounting holes). I opened up the lapdock and routed power out to where the USB & HDMI connectors were, and then had a bundle of cables connecting the lapdock to the NUC & supplying it battery power.

In total, it cost just under $700. It gets about 3 hours of battery life doing day-to-day activities. It occupied less volume than my previous laptop, but was overall thicker due to the bulge of the NUC. One could probably slim it down a bit if they wanted to.

The weak point was the HDMI connection though - it flaked out about a month ago and I can't figure out which part of the system is broken (display, NUC, or cables) because they all work fine individually.

Anyway, I'm all for a DIY laptop. Though Arch Linux Arm does most things I want, it's a pain to have to modify so many pkgbuilds and add the line "ARM7h" or whatever to get them to compile, and occasionally go in and fix code by some idiot who thought that it was OK to inline x86 assembly without even having a check for the target platform. Plus, linux gaming on arm is basically non-existent, to my knowledge. So even for a DIY laptop, I wouldn't settle for a non-x86 processor yet.