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ARM64 Linux Workstation

jasoneckert.github.io

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Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#421

Post by tjoff »

Joeri wrote: post #420
tjoff wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely if you consider apple hardware you don't care about performance, price or supporting an ecosystem that underpins the very essence of you are trying to do. Buying mac hardware for a linux workstation is madness.

I would argue there are zero options in x86 land that will give you the mac studio form factor (tiny, stylish, quiet) with that level of performance. PC workstations in that class are noisy big beasts. For some people how it looks is part of the set of requirements, and it is not “madness” to also care about that.

Noisy beasts... Hyperbole much?

But yes, if by workstation you mean shiny then sure!

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#422

Post by antifa »

ip26 wrote: post #188
leidenfrost wrote: post #9

Imho the only relevant parts left are: Sleep (which is being tackled right now), USB-C Extra displays (Also WIP) and Hardware Decode for video.

Linux 2013: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now Linux 2023: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now

I've still had better experiences with closed laptop lids when using Linux in comparison to windows in the last decade.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#423

Post by diffeomorphism »

endorphine wrote: post #399
cycomanic wrote: post #365

I don't get the hype around apple silicon for desktop computers. I sort of understand the power efficiency argument for laptops (although it is often overstated IMO, I could work for >10h straight with my X1 carbon 6 years ago), but for Desktop it is trivial to build a PC that runs significantly faster, with much more upgradability and flexibility for a fraction of the price. So if I want performance on a Linux syste…

More than 19 hours on X1 Carbon? For real? Mine barely lasts 6 hours and it's 2 years-old. I'm using Linux without a GUI.

The claim was more than 10 and seems accurate, e.g.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-...

Also just throwing out there that the X1 weighs about 500g less than a MacBook pro and a powerbank is about 500g.

That said, if you are fine with weight and battery life is important, 2015 was the year to be:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9623/the-lenovo-thinkpad-t450...

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#424

Post by twoodfin »

zahllos wrote: post #341
dijit wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure, but anecdotally I have a machine running linux that was $6,000 and definitely feels slower than my M2 macbook air. Mostly its a question of latency I would imagine. My machine: Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel). Threadripper 3970x 256G DDR4 2666MHz 3x4TiB NVMe (PCIe Gen3) in RAID0 Radeon VII GFX card (more than enough for 2D render of terminals).

I attended a talk by a PhD student who specializes in CPU/architectural research, on the M1 as an architecture. There are some key differences in design, such as unified memory etc, but what accounts for a large part of the performance gap with x86 is the fact Apple's compilers can target their specific microarchitecture and optimize for that, because they know its performance characteristics well. We know the perfor…

Owning every layer of the platform helps with the microarchitecture design as well: They’ve got massive quantities of real world profiling data / instruction traces. These are invaluable in assessing the trade-offs in how you do branch prediction, cache associativity & a thousand other decisions.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#425

Post by Maursault »

whalesalad wrote: post #258
Maursault wrote: post #130

> This January, I installed Asahi Linux on Apple’s most powerful ARM64 system: the Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM Sucker. For the same price, OP could have had TWO Mac Studios Max 10-core with 64GB RAM each, which together would absolutely spank the Mac Studio Ultra 20-core with 128GB RAM. Why are people falling for this!?

I want to respond but I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.

It's not. Two Studios Max considerably outperform one Studio Ultra.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#426

Post by josephcsible »

astrange wrote: post #271
josephcsible wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speakers work but are disabled by default because there is a risk it could blow up the hardware Wait, what? This sounds like a pretty egregious design flaw on Apple's part.

Speakers are just things that move when you send electricity to them. It's not hard to blow up something like that if you try, especially if they heat up over time.

Then why isn't this a problem with the built-in speakers of any non-Apple device?

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#427

Post by fargle »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #321

Just so that I understand this correctly: he bought a $6000+ Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM. But all these cores, ram, bandwidth, storage are not important, but rather the fact it is an "ARM64" workstation is what was the game changer. Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?

No doubt having lots of threads and lots of memory make this a very nice workstation.

But it's about twice the price of a 16-core AMD 7955 which has about 150% the performance both per core and overall. The M1 certainly might win on power, though.

Using a machine of this class is mind blowing, that author isn't wrong about that. But there's still about a 3x price/performance gap. I love ARM and I can't wait for this to get more mainstream, but it's not quite here yet if you are cost conscious.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+7950X&i... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+Ultra+20+C...

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#428

Post by rektide »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #347
FooBarWidget wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.

The most annoying thing that prevents me from running --auto-tune on bootup is that there's no way to exclude USB devices. So if I boot when docked, the mouse will stop working when I don't move it for a few seconds and I need to click to make it work again. And no, unplugging it once is not an acceptable solution.

It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse!

Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well.

Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into.

https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#429

Post by gfiorav »

OJFord wrote: post #393
gfiorav wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a thinkpad x13s and i’m happy with it

Oh I didn't realise they existed! Nice. Performance/specs-wise, I haven't looked in-depth, but seems they compete more with iPads/other tablets + keyboard cases than with Macbook Pros/x86 options in that class and price point though? Thanks though, seems promising. I've been interested in Asahi since I first saw it here, but I can't help wondering if long-term the better buy might not be a ThinkPad, Framework or what…

Performance sucks comprared to the m1 :)

I use it for dev so I don’t care. Don’t expect to train any models with it.

It’s very snappy for media consumption though, no issues at all there (if you stick to ARM native apps).

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#430

Post by AnthonyMouse »

coldtea wrote: post #410
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the Unix utilities that are included were written by third parties. They're "included by default" because they're useful and take up a negligible amount of space.

They're included by default because they are standard UNIX userland. FUSE is nowhere near that.

FUSE is newer than netcat or bzip2. That doesn't mean it isn't expected as standard. Linux, BSD and others all have it.
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