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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

I hope this and projects like it spearhead a movement of ARM laptops outside of the Apple-sphere.

I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”. Seems right up their alley.

Also worth noting that I understand that System76 and Apple are not comparable companies. One is a humble operation installing a custom Linux build on rebranded hardware, and the other is a vertically integrated powerhouse building it’s own hardware.

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The problem is no other laptop manufacturer besides Apple has the capital and resources to build their own chip.

Definitely not true, IP blocks are available for all critical features and chip layout can be outsourced. ARM has a Cortex-X chip available for licensing for anyone that wants a high performance CPU core.

For example, HP (who also makes laptops) has custom ASICs running Linux in their printers.

Even if you use all licensed IP the market might not be profitable enough to pay back the cost. We're talking about a $50M+ leap of faith.

HP had 10.2 billion in profit last year.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/HPQ/financials/annual...

Certainly enough to take a 50 million dollar risk.

Not just their own chip, arguable one of the highest performance ones. At Intel, the mobile division was simply trying to keep pace with Arm with Apple always a distant dream. Later at Arm, no one had any idea what the hell Apple was doing. They pay for the ISA and that is basically as far as I ever saw the collaboration going (besides poaching top engineers).

Most interesting thing I ever saw was that they bought Intrinsity[1] to create custom EDA tools for them. There is a decent technical moat to overcome.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity

Does anyone know if these EDA and other manufacturing tools are run internally on MacOS? I recall some comments when an Apple factory tour showed some tools running on Windows, on iMacs.

If it’s anything like Intel/Arm there are likely huge internal HPC Unix clusters with attached FPGAs for simulation and design.

I wouldn’t expect them to.

> I wonder if System76, for example, has their eyes on being the first to market as “the Linux laptop on ARM”.

They are not the first already: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

Ah yeah pine64! But how does it compare to the M1 performance? I should have explicitly stated that these ideal computers would match or outperform Apple’s hardware, since that is very much the case with current intel based MacBooks

Pinebook does the typical "as cheap and low-end as possible" linux stuff.

I would love to see ARM linux hardware manufacturer who would aim to create a high-end fanless powerhorse like mac mini.

You and me both. I believe it will happen eventually, it seems inevitable now

Minor correction: The mac mini isn't fanless

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