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ARM64 Linux Workstation

jasoneckert.github.io

31–40 of 493 posts

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#31

Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost? There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities. Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?

I save 20€ per month by using my Macbook instead of desktop PC in electricity. At least 720 euros from three years.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#32

> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. How nice of Apple. #snarc

#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#33
> Everything - and I mean everything - is unbelievably fast.

As a long time Linux user and someone forced to use MacOS, my hands are itching to buy a 2nd M1/M2 mac and install Asahi linux on it. I've never felt such excitement since the days of Compiz.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#34
post #17

hdmi and workstation doesnt fit, but you can down vote me its fine I dont care.

Okay but it supports 5 monitors. 1 via HDMI and 4 via the Thunderport / DisplayPort Type-C outputs. I've got a Lenovo Thinkpad and I use a $15 Type C to DisplayPort adapter and it works fine at 4K @60Hz

The specs say it supports 6K @60Hz over the Type-C ports and 4K for the HDMI port

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#35

That's really impressive! That said, I really wish someone other than Apple would release something like an ARM64 NUC, with good Linux compat. Even something on par with the SD Gen 2 should be plenty to run a desktop day to day.

I was really tempted to try this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027280 but the 16GB of RAM was too tiny for my day-to-day. It seemed to be a common trend in arm64 things one can buy nowadays

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#36

Asahi Linux is amazing and pretty usable at this point. However, last I tried I couldn't get stuff like Slack and Spotify to work on it because there are no Arm packages for those. Has anyone found a way around that?

Electron and apps built with it are missing from most ARM64 Linux distributions.

Once you've built Electron (or downloaded their binaries), many of the builds fail because they download something that requires x86_64, and then you get to troubleshoot that.

Flathub doesn't have aarch64 builds of most of these apps either, so I'm assuming it is not just me having issues.

So much for cross platform. It is doable for the open source apps if you want to get your hands dirty though.

It did motivate me to look for non-Electron replacements (to Electron apps, not Slack and Spotify specifically), so I've got that going for me.

Sent from an RPi4 I use as an always on workstation.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#37
post #30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything will work. Once upon time I tried to make CTF with M2 Pro, and I seriously wished that I had x86_64 Linux instead. Many of the penetration testing tools are not mainstream and they include pre-build x86_64 binaries, or are configured just to not compile with ARM, for reason unknown. And there is no time to figure out what is wrong. I know this might be a niche scenario, but still...

That seems like a wonderful opportunity to use QEMU since it's not all that performance-sensitive (I think?) and you're not running random pre-built binaries directly on your computer.

I ran all my stuff inside non-root non-volume container so prebuilt binary it is not really a problem.

I used QEMU through Podman machine in the end, but the performance is terrible. Even on MacOS side QEMU does not support Rosetta 2. Docker for Desktop supports and gives significant boost, but I don’t want to use it.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#38
post #32

> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. How nice of Apple. #snarc

#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.

It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that hard to believe when you consider the hardware specs for Apple machines are so heavily locked down to a very specific set of mobo, cpu, and only variability in core count, ram amount, hard drive size, etc. It's not like PC world of mix and match everything.

It's hard to believe because virtually none of the proprietary Apple Silicon platform (except the CPU instruction set itself) is documented and involved a tremendous amount of reverse-engineering effort by some very bright volunteers .

And yet open source community embraces the hardware with fervor.

Re: ARM64 Linux Workstation

#40
post #32

> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. How nice of Apple. #snarc

#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.

if you need AVX-512 ( x86-64-v4 ) then Ryzen 9 7950X3D 3D V-Cache is also good alternative.

"AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance"

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen9-7950x3d-linux

"From the nearly 400 benchmarks, when taking the geo mean the 7950X3D was at 97% the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X while on average being at 60% the power consumption rate. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D in these non-gaming workloads was 11% faster than the Intel Core i9 13900K and at around 60% the power."

+

"AMD Unveils Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Up to 128 MB of L3 Cache And 5.7 GHz Boost"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18709/amd-unveils-ryzen-9-795...

HN Thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34260253

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