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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

For tech dominance not to occur other players need to get their heads out of their collective asses and offer something competitive.

Yes, I shouldn't expect Raspberry to run non-ARM software... but why exactly shouldn't I? Where are the trillion-upon-trillion-dollar players like Google, Samsung and others with their Rosetta-like translation layers? And Qualcomm with competitive CPUs?

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This is frankly a ludicrous ask of a 35 dollar hobbyist single board education computer with an old CPU. I hate the dreaded car analogies too, but this is akin to buying a cheap Toyota saloon and expecting it to accelerate like a Ferrari.

For what its worth, there are some rosetta like options on RPi - you can run x86 containers in QEMU, for example. Its just again you've bought a 35 dollar computer - its not going to be fast enough to be performant for most tasks when translating (in real time!) software written for a completely different CPU architecture.

> https://gist.github.com/Sitin/bfa5e770b80ab4b8740c88e648666c...

> This is frankly a ludicrous ask of a 35 dollar hobbyist single board education computer with an old CPU.

Linux is being developed mostly by trillion-dollar corporations. Intel. Google. Samsung. etc.

ARM chips are designed and produced by Samsung, Qualcomm etc.

You'd think they would:

- come up with a competitive chip, and

- Rosetta-like software

that even "$35 dollar hobbyist computer" would be able to do this with, quote "powerful 64-bit CPU".

Alas.

And no, I'm not buying the whole "you shouldn't expect". Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.

That $35 SBC is running a CPU that costs a comparatively lower amount to produce than an M1. Putting 20 billion transistors on a single die reliably at 5nm is extremely more costly than a billion or so at 28nm (the BCM2711).

If you want Broadcom to release a CPU that's on par with the M1, half of your Pi's circuit board will be just the CPU die's BGA pins.

Intel's (and others') price gouging and market segmentation does not in any way imply that it's possible to manufacture an i7/i9/R7/R9/M1 at $20 a piece.

Everyone continues to willingly miss the point. Let me spell it out again.

--- start quote ---

Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.

--- end quote ---

you know the pi is pretty amazing for what it is. the hdmi 1080p output alone was groundbreaking with the first pi

The other side of the puzzle is software. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of headroom in the rpi hardware, if only someone re-write and re-optimize the os and software for it.

That's part of the magic of Mac - they got to hire as many people to optimize the os as they did to build the chip / computer itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571075

You can also run x86 32bit binaries on the Pi with box86: https://box86.org/

Surprisingly performant and very impressive.

The Raspberry Pi has found great success as a console and coinop arcade game emulator, so of course, a RPi is a turing device meaning it can run all the things that any other turing device can run.

It's great at emulating arcades! that's totally non-arm software.

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