Qualcomm brought a company named Nuvia, which are ex-Apple engineers that help designed the M series Apple silicon chips to produce Oryon which exceeds Apple’s M2 Max in single threaded benchmarks.
The impression I get is than these are for PCs and laptops
I’ve been following the development of Asahi Linux (Linux on the M series MacBooks) with this new development there’s some exciting times to come.
I’m just eager to know how much laptops will cost with the new Qualcomm chip. I don’t want to pop champagne too early only to realize that new ARM laptops cost $2000.
I’d expect them to start around 1k. Not many people are going to be buying these devices so there’s no economies of scale.
Also I love how qualcomm announced this CPU and a day later Apple releases the M3 which is finally a real upgrade from the M1.
Lots of tech companies might be interested. For example, at my work we are now stuck half way between x64 and arm, both on the server side and on the developers side (Linux users are on x64 and Mac users are on arm). While multiarch OCI/docker containers minimize the pains caused by this, it would still be easier to go back to a single architecture.
Qualcomm chip won’t be binary compatible with Apple chips, so nothing will change for you.
New tech always comes at a cost, hopefully with the many manufacturers partnering with Qualcomm in this project we’ll have competitive pricing better than the current offering that Apple silicon provides.
Used to be, each year-ish computers got faster AND cheaper. So, it doesn’t “always” have to be that way.
That’s not happening anymore due to real world constraints, though. Dennard scaling combined with Moore’s Law allowed us to get more performance per watt until around 2006-2010, when Dennard scaling stopped applying - transistors had gotten small enough that thermal issues and other current leakage related challenges meant that chip manufacturers were no longer able to increase clock frequencies each generation.
Even before 2006 there was still a cost to new development, though, us consumers just got more of an improvement per dollar a year later than we do now.
I kind of agree, in that ARM is even more locked down than x86, but if I could get an ARM with UEFI and all computational power is available to the Linux kernel, then I wouldn’t mind trying one out for a while.
But yes, I can’t wait for RISC-V systems to become mainstream for consumers.
Generally speaking, and I’m not talking about your Raspberry Pi’s, but even there we find some limitations for getting a system up and booting - and it’s not for lack of transistors.
But say if you take a consumer facing ARM device, almost always the bootloader is locked and apart of some read only ROM - that if you touch it without permission voids your warranty.
Compare that with an x86 system, whereby the boot loader is installed on an independent partition and has to be “declared” to the firmware, which means you can have several systems on the same machine.
Note how I’m talking about consumer devices and not servers for data centres or embedded systems.
I think you’ll be waiting a pretty long time for high end RISC-V CPUs, unfortunately. I don’t particularly trust Qualcomm, but I’m really hoping to see some good arm laptops for Linux.
You don’t trust… a company that licenses an ISA?
When your current alternative is a duopoly spearheaded by Intel?
I hope for Microsoft to just give up and build a new "windows“ which is just an other Linux distro xD
Ducking windows can’t even clone the Linux kernel right now
IIRC Microsoft’s woes in the ARM space is two-fold. First is the crushing legacy compatibility and inability to muster developers around anything newer than win32, and second was signing a deal to make Qualcomm the exclusive ARM processors for Windows for who knows how long.
Qualcomm you say?
I’ll believe it when it ships
Qualcomm is my main fear also. They will ship it with lots of closed source firmware digitally signed with their private keys which users can’t replace so expect a shitty bootloader and don’t forget about always running hypervisior, trust zone and world most kept secret modem
don’t care about absolute performance, more interested in performance/watt
