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floatboth

> I wonder if a Q32-17 workstation could be put together for cheaper than whatever the cheapest Apple M1 pro device is

Nah. You can't just get a chip & mainboard retail since there is basically no market for that.

About the only option for an Altra workstation is a prebuilt for "as low as $7661" :(

https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-altra-64bit-arm-workstati...

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Someone needs the courage to make a motherboard and CPU with off the shelf parts and a socketed chip in the non-x86 space. That was one of the key reasons that the IBM PC succeeded: it was easy to clone. Without that it's likely it would have been just another interesting footnote in history. But because IBM didn't take the time to do everything custom and locked in others were able to enter the market and make things happen. Honestly I don't think anyone sells socketed ARM64 or RISC-V chips. There might be OpenPOWER but I don't think anyone is really fabbing them at a cost that a consumer could even consider.

Sadly I don't think that sort of courage is in copious supply it's always easier to vendor lock people than it is to take the risk of someone else eating your lunch. So until that happens I just don't see non-x86 platforms really eating into the desktop/laptop market in any large share.

I don't think anyone is really fabbing them at a cost that a consumer could even consider.

What are the Chinese getting up to?

Well, Raspberry Pi, with the Compute Module 4 has done this on the low-end and an ecosystem appears to be developing rapidly with a wide variety of carrier boards and a handful of 3rd-party compute module cards (e.g. Pine64 SOQuartz and the Radxa CM3)

> Someone needs the courage to make a motherboard and CPU with off the shelf parts and a socketed chip in the non-x86 space.

Honestly? If they want an easy win, that someone should be Intel or AMD.

They already design and release desktop and mobile chipsets with "platform specs" that are designed to be copied wholesale by all the major motherboard and PC vendors.

If Intel released a socketed ARM CPU with a chipset and a platform spec to go with it, you'd be able to buy a motherboard for it from ASUS or MSI for $150 within six months.

AMD's original plan for Zen was to have an x86 chip + socket-compatible ARM chip as well.

AMD didn't seem to have the funding needed to execute this plan though, and killed the ARM-project. To be fair, AMD was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy at this time, and it probably was just too much risk for them to even attempt to such a strange and risky strategy.

AMD did release a few ARM chips to test the waters. But the ARM-based AMD chips never sold in high numbers or got much demand, so AMD doubled-down on x86-only Zen chips instead.

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Allegedly, AMD still owns their ARM-based decoder and therefore can convert their Zen-chips over from x86 into ARM-based instructions if they ever felt like it made business sense. Given how successful EPYC is however, there's probably no need for AMD to do something this risky (might as well keep selling these x86 chips like hotcakes, AMD is practically supply-constrained as it is and doesn't need to do weird things like that to sell its chips)

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See:

* https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

AMD actually did this in the distant past with the original 32-bit Athlons.

They used the DEC Alpha EV6 bus from the 21264 microprocessor. It would be interesting to have seen DEC StrongARM adapted to the same bus, and a single motherboard able to run any of these CPUs with the right BIOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_A

Other than BIOS/UEFI as far as I know nothing is stopping them from using existing chipsets/motherboards. I don't recall anything on the chipset itself being inherently tied to x86 per se. I think even port IO is handled in the SOC/microcode these days. So they could probably do it. Particularly if they reused things like the AMD IO die etc. No need to reinvent the wheel because the cores are different.

UEFI is also ported to ARM64 and officially supported by Windows on compatible boards.

> That was one of the key reasons that the IBM PC succeeded: it was easy to clone. Without that it's likely it would have been just another interesting footnote in history. But because IBM didn't take the time to do everything custom and locked in others were able to enter the market and make things happen.

I’m reasonable sure IBM PCs were totally custom and locked down, and they got reverse engineered enabling “IBM Compatible” clones to spring up.

The IBM PC was the first computer IBM made that used entirely off the shelf chips except one: the BIOS

The BIOS chip was just copied outright for the first clones, but that was ruled illegal in court so later compatibles reverse engineered the code and made their own.

Ouch. I (hypothetically -- some alternative version of me that had more free time and free money) would be willing to pay some early adopter, "I'm buying fun parts" tax, but $7k for 32 threads @ 1.7GHz is a bit much even for hypothesizing. I wonder what they have in mind for that chip, then.

It's mainly intended as a server CPU, which often go for for lots of cores / threads over maximum single core clockspeed. That 32 core / 1.7GHz config doesn't seem too hot for either though.

The workstation is presumably intended as a developer tool really, for those that want real hardware on hand instead of remote access (and don't want a noisy server in an office). Going to be even more niche and low volume than the server versions, so gonna cost a fair chunk.

For fun parts you can get an NXP LX2160A board from SolidRun (or the earlier Marvell Armada8k one).

The performance wouldn't be competitive (Cortex-A72 is really old by now) but it's nice to have a proper arm64 desktop.

If datacenters adopt it in a few years we will be able to get the decomm'd stuff - once the hardware refresh cycles hit ebay and the like will be flooded with stuff.

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