Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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My first question would be, why has no industry trade group attempted to define a standard socket, or use an existing physical socket pin-out.

It's not hard to acquire something with an ARM CPU on it, but at prices an ordinary person can afford, they're all in the category of toy computers. Try to find an affordable ARM system with a M.2 2280 NVME SSD slot on it like you can find on a $100 desktop x86-64 motherboard. Or multiple PCI-Express 3.0 x8/x16 slots.

I've previously spent many years working for a hardware manufacturer. Personal theory is that this is a real example of a chicken or egg problem related to economies of scale. Nobody wants to spend dozens of millions of dollars tooling up to produce ARM socketed CPUs and motherboards and stuff, which may or may not be price/performance competitive with current-gen Intel and AMD stuff by the time it's ready for release. And there's a huge risk in manufacturing something like that and then discovering that the sales volumes are really low.

Look at the sheer massive quantities that the top-ten Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers churn out every year.

> You can wipe pretty much any Android device (not just phones, but also HDMI "streaming boxes", which are a convenient form-factor for basing a workstation on) and install Linux on them

No you really can't, and phones aren't servers. Take any modern $600 smartphone and try installing something very close to a stock debian or centos on it. Being able to maybe boot a Linux kernel on something doesn't mean that there's anything like the market demand for that particular hardware platform target for a whole distribution.

> My first question would be, why has no industry trade group attempted to define a standard socket, or use an existing physical socket pin-out.

Because ARM is a design licensed to companies that want to make their own chips for their own purposes. Those purposes involve optimizing cost by choosing, per product, whether to integrate various cores onto the SoC, or to leave them as external devices on the board, or to maybe put them into a secondary chipset microcontroller and route some IO pins to connect the two.

In ARM designs, the licensee determines the required pin-out, because the licensee determines what the CPU does vs. what the board does. You can't really have a generic "ARM board", because no two "ARM CPUs" would have the same expectations for what are on that board.

A particular ARM licensee could standardize the socket between their own designs—but in doing so, they'd lose a lot of the advantage of licensing vs. buying an off-the-shelf chip in the first place.

a whole lot of arm chips are too small to reasonably be socketed

These have an M.2 slot. https://www.seeedstudio.com/ROCK-Pi-4-Model-B-4GB-p-4137.htm...

https://www.youtube.com/explainingcomputers is a good YouTube channel for reviewing these types of single board computers.

Has a M.2 slot doesn't mean you can put any M.2 ssd in it, especially M.2 2280 is the most common size and easily can buy on store/online, smaller than that is mostly for OEM devices and you don't have many choices available.

Not about the M.2 slot, but a shout-out to Explainingcomputers. I graduated as an embedded systems programmer, but changed careers along the way. This channel reignited my passion for embedded systems and now i'm an enthusiastic hobbyist again.

An economic viewpoint on your first question is that there is not enough margin (or energy, leverage, etc) left in the system level ecosystem to press for the need for a standard. In the old days Compaq etc very strongly pushed for standards to help them PCs move away from IBM. This began to come undone around the time of EISA, which was ratified but failed, and PCI, which was Intel sponsored. It only got worse after AMD (and other x86 semis) lost ground to Intel.

> My first question would be, why has no industry trade group attempted to define a standard socket, or use an existing physical socket pin-out.

There's Qseven [1] and SMARC [2].

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qseven

2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Mobility_Architecture

Isn't the answer quite simple? There is no demand.

We have reached the point where shipping 1.2B Smartphone per year is called massive, comparing to 200M PC market where 150M of those are laptop ( Soldered and non Socketed ).

You cant buy a self made ARM PC. But there will be Qualcomm ARM Laptop. And the AWS ARM CPU are based on ARM N1 Design, it is only a matter of time somebody make the same CPU, or System integrator selling CPU made from other ARM CPU vendor such as Fujisu, Ampere, Huawei, Marvell, or possibly Nvidia and others.

I dont see much of a problem in getting ARM access as consumers.

You're basically waiting for Apple to go ARM on its desktops/notebooks.

Folks already anticipating this in 2020.

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/arm-macs/

Microsoft, which is collaborating with Qualcomm on netbooks.

Google, which has previously collaborated (OP1) with Rockchip on Chrome OS.

Microsoft also as the Azure Sphere ARM SBC.

Sphere is a special purpose device, not for every day general computing, and I am yet to see when it will be finally made secure as adverstised (given the use of C without any kind of special security tooling).

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