ARM Development for the Office: Unboxing an Ampere EMag Workstation | Hacker News Reader

ARM Development for the Office: Unboxing an Ampere EMag Workstation

anandtech.com

67 pointsksec21 comments

I know it's not exactly raw-metal ARM development, but I've been using Microsoft's ARM-based (SQ1 processor) Surface Pro X for the last few months for web development and have been pleasantly surprised that the majority of my stack not only works without tweaks on an ARM-based system, but is very performant. WSL2 is really unlocking actually using these machines full time! Particularly powerful has been the new Chromium-based Edge–fully native modern web browser on ARM, very performant, battery-friendly and rock-solid, which makes me wonder why Google isn't shipping an ARM-based Chrome port yet, given it's clearly already building/in use upstream.

> makes me wonder why Google isn't shipping an ARM-based Chrome port yet, given it's clearly already building/in use upstream.

Better yet, there are ARM Chromebooks, so it's not like Google considers it experimental support or something.

I use my Raspberry PI 4 for compiling and testing my ARM code to run on various screen-less embedded devices. It's surprisingly fast and convenient and I do not have to bother with a cross-compiler.

I'm using for similar job RPi3 and one OrangePi Zero.

I am running gitlab runner on rpi, which consumes only jobs tagged with "rpi3".

I want one of these machines so bad. Would be an epic workstation, but the price tag is high. OpenBSD would mostly just work on these, as it already runs on the server boards. It even already has AMD graphics drivers ported to arm64, and a chromium browser port!

> OpenBSD would mostly just work on these

Open source in general seems to mostly handle different platforms nicely; other than the odd program that assumes things about word size or endianness or whatever, it's usually just a recompile away. Heck, NetBSD and OpenBSD still happily support sparc :)

I love the idea but damn that's arguably worse port selection than a Raspberry Pi 4 for like 100x the price, size, and power consumption.

It seems like what people really want is a many-core ARM SoC in a laptop. Turn most of the cores off when doing simple stuff on battery power, then turn them on for bursty parallelizable tasks like compiling code.

256 Gigs of ram and a 32 core 2.8ghz CPU certainly outclass the Pi though. $3000 is reasonable for businesses, but yeah it’s not quite right for home use.

I think they will not get much interest at that price point (3000+)

They are similar in price to the Raptor POWER9 systems.

TALOS2 and Blackbird have better offering at this price point...

Seems totally reasonable to me as a workstation. Just the 256gb RAM alone is about half of that sum.

Sooo confused by this. This doesn't seem competitive at all. Is there some super secret special sauce that's not immediately apparent in the spec sheet? Who the hell is going to buy this?????

This is for companies with big budgets doing ARM development, not startups and hobbyists.

I'm more tempted by one of these [1], clock speed is a lot lower than the Ampere but I'm limited by RAM on all my current AArch64 systems.

[1] https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/

Forget clock speed, the worse problem is that these are A53 cores.

I like the Marvell MACCHIATObin, A72 @ 2GHz runs Firefox well enough.

Apple sells Macbooks that are more expensive than this machine and with significantly worse specs.

The ultimate RISC OS machine...

How many cores does this machine have?

32: in the article

Reply on news.ycombinator.com