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Comment by boris | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for working on this! It would be great if making Asahi generally usable was not blocked by the GPU driver. Currently Apple M1 is the only generally-available ARM hardware that can be used for testing other software for compatibility with ARM. So an installable version without desktop support would be very appreciated.

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It's not blocked on the GPU driver; you can already boot a desktop on the boot-time framebuffer (this has worked for months). The issue right now is that as I mentioned at the end, things like USB and storage work but aren't quite there yet and are spread around various kernel branches, so our next step is indeed going to be to get that all in shape so that there is one known good kernel branch for people to use. That will give you Ethernet, USB, NVMe, etc. Then we'll tackle the GPU after that.

https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1419469011734073347

That's great to hear, thanks!

I'm typing this from an AArch64 device that's not an M1 and runs Linux. What are you talking about.

Well come on, what is it :)

Raspberry Pi?

A Pinephone haha. I post here often enough on it that I'm thinking about adding hackernews to /etc/hosts or deleting my account.

Just testing non-desktop software on ARM – you could use a Raspberry Pi 4 for that. Or a Pinebook Pro. Or just an EC2 instance!

For "real workstation" class hardware (i.e. working PCIe/XHCI/AHCI on standard ACPI+UEFI systems with mostly FOSS firmware) nothing beats SolidRun boards (MACCHIATObin/HoneyComb LX2K). Yeah yeah the Cortex-A72 cores are really showing their age, oh well, on the other hand the SoCs are not embedded cursed crap :)

Avantek also sells a few workstations that are basically Ampere ARM server boards stuffed into desktop cases. Very powerful CPUs with up the 80 Neoverse N1 cores, lots of PCIe and RAM slots, very expensive.

https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-desktops.html

What makes all of the other ARM hardware available unsuitable?

Especially for example that a Jetson AGX Xavier with 32GB of RAM is available at the same price point as an M1 Mac mini.

For $50 more, you can get: https://www.solid-run.com/arm-servers-networking-platforms/h... on which you just add your own DRAM sticks too.

If everything wasn't so built around CUDA the M1 GPU actually gives you twice the performance

Source?

Look at any online benchmark? It runs at a similar clock and has twice the tensor cores, the AGX is a 2 year old 12nm chip. Why would anyone be surprised if the M1 was faster?

3 years old in the market.

And since then: 12nm -> 10nm -> 7nm -> 5nm

Why is this the kind of ARM processor you need, and not a raspberry pi?

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