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, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed.
Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
Wasn’t booting other operating systems supported from early on (two months after release of M1)? It was reverse engineering the graphics hardware that took time and effort.
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
I see the problem, but I don't see a clear analysis on the actual source of the problem. I assumed the issue was mainly single core performance, but he is also suggesting context switches could be the cause?
So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores.
My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity.
And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
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.
Has anyone ever pretended that (non-Apple) ARM hardware running Linux makes for a remotely suitable desktop experience for the general public or are you shadow boxing here?
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, they have single thread performance exactly were it is needed.
Maybe we will need 80 cores in future, that is cool but for daily home use it is still just way too much for what we need.
The AArch64 desktop experiment started in 2020 with the Macbook M1 and it ended in 2026 with great success with Apple phasing out support for Intel.
It is called Apple Silicon.
Which is somewhat useless because it doesn't properly support ACPI/UEFI so that you can boot other operating systems
Wasn’t booting other operating systems supported from early on (two months after release of M1)? It was reverse engineering the graphics hardware that took time and effort.
Linux on apple silicon is a thing though: https://asahilinux.org/
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
I see the problem, but I don't see a clear analysis on the actual source of the problem. I assumed the issue was mainly single core performance, but he is also suggesting context switches could be the cause?
So could you fix that with a new scheduler? Or you just need another SoC with better single core performance? I could imagine that the latter already exists, just not in soc with >16 cores. My naive view is that such high core count system comes with tradoff on core size and interconnect/memeory bus complexity.
And I mean.. my phone is a middle lower end device and for sure I can play youtube videos (maybe in a popup as well) and run the browser without noticing that much difference from my laptop.
I think the single core performance would be bearable if it wasn't combined with maintaining a custom built kernel.
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.
Can the ThinkPad T14 ARM Snapdragon variant function without pain as a daily Linux/BSD driver?
Snapdragon has excellent single-thread performance (unlike Ampere) if that’s what you’re asking.
No. It can run Windows well though.
Without pain? I mean, there is pain when using Linux. It just works better than, say, Windows.
The Desktop Linux will take over from here guys. Next year it will be ready, together with GNU Hurd for everyone and their Grandma.
Has anyone ever pretended that (non-Apple) ARM hardware running Linux makes for a remotely suitable desktop experience for the general public or are you shadow boxing here?