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Comment by boudin | Hacker News Reader

I love seeing those alternatives to x86, Intel an AMD showing up. After long years of nothing exciting on the CPU side until AMD released Zen, now the M1 from Apple and this, hardware feels exciting again. I also really like the fact that Ampere cpus are not something that will only live in one ecosystem (like the graviton that will, i guess, never exists outside of AWS or the M1 outside of Apple products).

I really hope something similar is going to show up for PC as well.

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I'm excited as well. But as an earlier discussion pointed out I'm worried that the transition might impact the openness in PCs, e.g. locked bootloaders etc

Yup. Finding out that Big Sur phones home every time one opens an application is a showstopper for me, never mind Apple's ever-changing ports and its campaign against the right to repair.

We've also already seen that Microsoft considers ARM systems to be "special" enough to require locked bootloaders as well. Don't get me started on the mess in the smartphone world. I'd hate to see a world where the only "open" computing revolves around either Raspberry Pi-class SBCs or expensive datacenter servers, with no middle ground.

Windows on arm64 systems aren't locked down.

Meanwhile for arm64 Macs, they aren't either. Yesterday, https://twitter.com/xenokovah/status/1339914714055368704?s=2... was released to run unsigned kernels.

It's encouraging to see an effort like this, but unless it can become a first-class citizen on M1 hardware, it will be at best like trying to keep an iDevice jailbroken, or having a custom Android ROM that lacks important basic functionality like VoLTE.

One can hope, I guess. If I could be sure I could run Linux without it being hobbled, and that Apple wouldn't pull the rug out from under me, I could actually see myself adding a Mac Mini to the stable.

Edit:

> Windows on arm64 systems aren't locked down.

Has this changed? I recall that on ARM, Microsoft requires that UEFI Secure Boot be enabled, cannot be disabled, and cannot load custom keys. So, you could boot Linux as long as it's been "blessed" by Microsoft, assuming they don't pull the rug out, much like the leaving Secure Boot enabled on an x86 PC (except on a PC you can usually load your own keys).

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/01/windo...

That was a restriction for 32-bit Arm Windows devices, which were indeed locked down. (I ended up breaking the Secure Boot implementation for Windows RT devices later on, and they didn't bother to fix it)

For 64-bit Arm Windows devices, they had the security policies of a conventional PC since the very beginning.

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I've long viewed that as one of the storm clouds on the horizon, as it was.

Alternate source, though may be dated to around the time of v2.2 of the UEFI spec.

https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how...

I find it funny that almost all the real gripes with user freedom infringement actually tend to come as a result of Microsoft or other big players getting their fingers into a hardware platform.

Not quite, since Apple actively works against jailbreaks on iOS. On macOS they have provided an actual path for code execution to boot alternate OSes.

When Windows 10X gets release it might be different, as the original before COVID happened was for it to be the introduction of Win32 sandboxing as well.

Now with Reunion merging both worlds, and Windows 10X only planned for 2021, it might be a different story.

Windows 10X is launching for Intel SoCs first, hopefully without locked BLs.

There is already a few ARM laptops that are quite open (like the pine64 ones). There's also ARM boards like the Raspberry PI. I hope that if there's more beefy CPUs and SoCs we'll see those poping up in similar devices as well.

Sort of. Even the Pi is not entirely open-source. The Broadcom SOC relies on some closed-source binaries.

There's an interesting rumor that says AMD is building an ARM SoC for OEMs...

If I were them I wouldn't even bother with anything pre-Arm v9. That's going to draw all the hype, especially when Apple announces the Arm v9-based M2 next year.

And then I'm sure most sheep-like OEMs will say "Oh, we want THAT, too. Where is it - we want it yesterday!" But AMD won't be able to provide one too soon, because they would've gone all in on Arm v8, and they'd want to squeeze at least a couple of generations out of that microarchitecture.

Something similar happened when Apple announced the first Armv8 processor and it took Qualcomm and all the rest 2 years to catch-up.

At the time of the intro of 64 bit ARM, the conventional wisdom was, "Pooh pooh, this'll just bloat your code and not offer any performance advantage whatsoever. How pointlessly stupid!"

The problem is that ARMv9, as I type this, is not available. Perhaps ARM holdings and/or NVidia are working on the ARMv9 instruction set, and there has been a lot of speculation about what ARMv9 will be, but so far nothing concrete. [1]

ARMv8 (i.e. 64-bit ARM), of course, has been around for a while now.

[1] Keep in mind that anything on Reddit not confirmed elsewhere is very likely either wild speculation or made up fiction.

Apple is usually the first to ship ARM designs. I think they are the only ARMv8.5 implementation at the moment.

Didn't they build the architecture and then chuck it?

I think they grafted 4 and 8 cortex a57 in to a package and it didn’t seem to have much market interest.

I too have heard that they have their own ARM micro architecture project though

I could see AMD grafting an Arm front end onto Epyc.

I think it's this rumor: https://www.hardwareheaven.com/amd-is-preparing-an-arm-soc-f...

Yes, called Seattle, in their codenames.

For a little while there was one partner who used it for Gluster ( or similar ) storage nodes.

It fit into the model of Arm processors that were performant enough to be the glue between hard disks or flash and a reasonably fast network. But after the PCI lanes were all dispatched there wasn't a lot of compute for applications on top.

I'm just blown away that Apple gets the credit for the Arm switch, but I'll take it.

Apple has been running ARM processors since the original iPhone.

Apple also part of the joint venture that started ARM.

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