Arm breaking into Intel's PC heartlands and worse is to come

submitted by Myocarditis-Man from theregister.com

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[–]Myocarditis-Man[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Do not want. Most ARM systems are completely proprietary, making it impossible to run a vanilla Linux kernel on them. The only reason this is possible on X86 is because it's a true standard. If we see a proliferation of ARM based PCs, we will also be seeing a large number of machines that can't effectively run anything other than Windows.

Yeah sure you might be able (with a lot of work) to make a version of Linux that runs on yours, and only yours, but you'll have no wifi or video drivers, and if you do, they will be proprietary and only for kernel versions X Y and Z. This is already how it works in Android land.

[–]BobOki 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I do not see that being a problem. A ton of ARM builds are out for Linux, mostly because linux is the system mostly used in SoC systems, which is primarily ARM. This spreads to phone, with android which is linux based. Lastly, linux has a ARM Compiler that will do the development of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications on 64-bit Armv8-A server-class hardware. Implements specifications including ABI for the 64-bit Arm architecture, Arm C Language Extensions (ACLE), and ACLE for SVE and SVE2. This, to me, says they are well on their way.

We will see though, with gaming how it is, mostly single core, this is going to be interesting. No clue how they would do server architecture... maybe kinda like how x64 has a bunch of cores, maybe ARM could do a processor with a bunch of ARM processors who will run in parallel and basically emulate multi-core processing, while remaining WAY faster and lower power/cooling doing it. Could be a cool future.... COULD

EDIT Forgot to mention that all the new Apple desktops are the M1, M2, etc are all ARM. All their phones are ARM as well, as is most phones.