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The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl

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Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#71

Post by preisschild »

dezgeg wrote: post #53
preisschild wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but they had to implement their own bootloader chain and because of such overhead they need a lot of effort to port to each new apple SoC generation

That is the reality for huge amount of ARM powered hardware, unless you fancy running vendor forks of kernel, u-boot, etc.

True, but not for all arm powered hardware. Especially the more expansive ones. The ampere altra based boards for example do support booting an uefi iso just like on amd64 PCs.

Look out for Systemready

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#72

Post by dlahoda »

bayindirh wrote: post #48
dlahoda wrote: post #45

he does not mention AI usage. how it helped to solve problems and search over git sources. intresting what he would achieve mixing nixos and ai for patches.

AI will be more harmful than helpful than a very big and unexplored (for them) codebase for them. Moreover, playing with code which fiddles with hardware directly is neither simple, nor easy, nor fun.

Big is what AI good at.

What exactly codebase is unexplored in article? Patches? Just load them in context. Linux is already in model as well as nix and hardware specs.

AI is good in search and playing(constrained synthesis) over hardware, Linux and configurations specs. Not fun thing.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#73

Post by aj_hackman »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

I use a DGX Spark every day as my daily driver and it's great. I barely use the "AI" facilities of it, but as an Aarch64 desktop Linux, I have no complaints.

I'm glad I'm not the only weirdo like this. I dropped an unfathomable $800 on a Jetson AGX Xavier in early 2020 simply because I was obsessed with SBCs at the time and couldn't stop thinking about it. This was before the Raspberry/Orange Pi 5 and Apple Silicon. I still use it as a graphics development workstation.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#74

Post by cmrdporcupine »

aj_hackman wrote: post #73
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #14

I use a DGX Spark every day as my daily driver and it's great. I barely use the "AI" facilities of it, but as an Aarch64 desktop Linux, I have no complaints.

I'm glad I'm not the only weirdo like this. I dropped an unfathomable $800 on a Jetson AGX Xavier in early 2020 simply because I was obsessed with SBCs at the time and couldn't stop thinking about it. This was before the Raspberry/Orange Pi 5 and Apple Silicon. I still use it as a graphics development workstation.

I dunno, I kept working on projects and at shops that had an Aarch64 deployment scenario that ended up involving cross compilation anyways. Either in the cloud in docker images on Aarch64 VPS, or on SBC for embedded systems. To me it was partially about eating my own dog food to have an ARM workstation without giving up Linux. And to have a giant amount of RAM and high speed networking at the same time.

Also a chance to learn some of the serving stack for inference.

In the end, it's worked out. It is power efficient, it shipped with a vendor supported Ubuntu. I can run Qwen 3.6 27b reasonably well on it. And it basically does everything I need applications wise.

It's also small and convenient enough I can toss it in a backpack and take it with me on trips when I'm staying at my elderly parents, just needing monitor/keyboard/mouse.

A laptop with same chipset would be nice but has its own downsides.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#75

Post by NavinF »

anthonj wrote: post #46
NavinF wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think youtube playback is a relevant comparison since it uses ~0 CPU. Pretty much all phones have hardware accelerated decoding. Lots of TVs and streaming devices use an ancient Android phone SoC yet they too can play YT and run a browser. The entire UI is often a local web app.

I imagine, be he mentions video playback on youtube making things worse, and he does have a dedicated amd gpu. But iirc for both Firefox and chromium on Linux desktop hw acceleration is tricky so maybe it's that.

Yes anything GPU related other than CUDA is a shit show on Linux desktop. Another issue is that YT loves to use AV1 if they know you're on desktop. Almost all desktop users have a CPU powerful enough to software decode it in realtime, but if you're on a prebuilt PC you'll definitely notice the fans kick in

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#76

Post by jordand »

__patchbit__ wrote: post #2

Can the ThinkPad T14 ARM Snapdragon variant function without pain as a daily Linux/BSD driver?

Qualcomm are slowly but steadily improving Linux support for the X1/X2 Snapdragon CPUs (such as the qcom-hamoa-ec driver in 7.2), so it's still a wait. I think there's some challenges with Secure Boot and the firmware with these Lenovo devices though.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#77

Post by kjellsbells »

I feel that OP should be congratulated on trying!

I dont see this experiment as any kind of "failure". Something was learned, and OP is better off for it. Computing and science literature would be a lot better off if people, like OP, honestly documented where things went wrong.

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#78

Post by ben-schaaf »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #27
HerbManic wrote: post #5

I'm not surprised at the outcome. These Ampere system single core/thread performance is pretty low and that is where you feel it. The OS/software simply cannot allocate the threads across enough cores effectively to make up for this difference. This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, t…

Apple M series is also aarch64 architecture, isn't it? Could you explain more why you expect Ampere to be slow but M series to be fast?

Benchmarks are easy to find. The basic M1 has double the single core performance over the Ampere Altra Max: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6915vs4104/Ampere-Altra...

Re: The end of my AArch64 desktop experiment

#80

Post by ItsHarper »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #27
HerbManic wrote: post #5

I'm not surprised at the outcome. These Ampere system single core/thread performance is pretty low and that is where you feel it. The OS/software simply cannot allocate the threads across enough cores effectively to make up for this difference. This is why things like the Apple M Series feels so fast, because while they don't win the multi core performance especially when going up against a 80 core beast like this, t…

Apple M series is also aarch64 architecture, isn't it? Could you explain more why you expect Ampere to be slow but M series to be fast?

To expand on what others have said, aarch64 merely defines the set of instructions that the CPU can perform. That has an impact on how you design processors, but you can still design multiple completely different processor architectures with different performance characteristics that all implement the aarch64 instruction set.
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