Ask HN: Where is the ARM desktop PC?
I was wondering, why ARM-based complete desktop PCs are not available. What are the blockers?
The rest of the industry seems fine with what AMD and Intel has at the moment, or incapable of making strong ARM-based competitors.
(But, because it breaks your expectation is why people don't like it, call it 'scrolljacking' i.e. hijacking scroll behaviour, etc. It's worst IMO when it's done to make the page 'sticky' at certain banner points, so it takes unintuitively more or less scroll movement at certain points as you move down the page.)
... and 2000 $
For this price a Bluray drive and some audio I/O would have been nice.
And you can send audio over USB. You can't possibly have more than 10 Gbps of audio?
> I never understood the incentive for getting rid of them.
Can't be that much of a mystery? Less weight, less space, less cost, less clunky mechanical stuff - given almost nobody would ever use them it's a no-brainer.
Don't you think that's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy? DVDs are absolutely not obsolete, and are still manufactured. Lots of content exists on DVD but not streaming. We get movies and shows at the library all the time that are not on any streaming platform.
Sure, everybody has a computer built only to stream, so streaming is the default for anybody who doesn't want to carry an external drive in their laptop bag. Design decisions influence how your product is used. Surprise, people who have phones without headphones jacks are less likely to use wired headphones.
However, I would still beg Apple to reconsider this, even a decade later, at least for desktop professional use. Blu-ray discs come in 25GB, 50GB, 100GB, and even (rare) 128GB disc sizes. It's still a really cheap, portable, distributable, long-term (as long as you check every ~5 years) storage medium.
[1]Blu-ray discs for movies were pretty shamefully designed. Do we seriously need 3 different codecs? Or 3 different copy-protection mechanisms?
Compared to good quality writable media which is designed for storage without power. This, and the write-once versions (no ransomware), are great for backups of faster modern media.
0. http://www.pricegrabber.com/blu-ray-external/products/?sort=...
Consider the source.
But I already have an external blu-ray drive that connects via USB, and I don't ever need audio beyond the headphone jack. Those who do can use the USB-C ports for that.
Maximum flexibility via USB, without a bunch of ports and parts that will be unused by most people, please.
I run several “windows only” apps on it as well as native Mac apps. Parallels + Windows-for-arm + Microsoft’s x86 emulation isn’t as smooth as Rosetta 2, but it’s still very very usable.
Running Altium[1] as I type, with a reasonably complex PCB in design (8 layers, DDR3, FPGA, HDMI) and it’s indistinguishable from running on a high-end PC. Said PC has been powered down for several months now, I just haven’t felt the need to use it.
Technically a laptop and not a desktop PC, but the strengths of ARM are much more apparent in power and heat constrained mobile settings. As long as ARM hasn't even gained a solid foothold in laptops (outside Apple), what's the point of putting it in a form factor where it will be even less attractive.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/th...
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/snapdragon-8cx-gen-3-intel-...
However, at $2000, it is very overpriced in comparison with a similar computer made with an Intel or AMD CPU.
In any case, this is far better than anything offered by Qualcomm and it is even better than most Apple offers at some of the features, e.g. the GPU.
For a ten times lower price, i.e. under $200, there are many desktop computers with Rockchip RK 3588 and 16 GB RAM, which have a quadruple Cortex-A76 CPU similar in performance with the Intel Jasper Lake CPUs and many times faster than Raspberry Pi or other computers using obsolete Arm cores.
As a professional, neither a Jasper Lake nor a Cortex-A76 based CPU would be acceptable for the daily work, but any such computer would be good enough for casual use, like Internet browsing, document editing or movie viewing.
It does however have more than a 128 bit wide memory interface, which is very rare. I can only think of the M1 pro (256 bit), m1 max (512 bit), and m1 ultra (1024 bit) that have wider interfaces and targeted at the normal desktop/laptop market.
So the holdup is that until Qualcomm bought Nuvia, their own designs were not good. The Surface Pro X sucked. The Nuvia-Snapdragons should be the turning point, but also ARM is suing Qualcomm over that so who knows.
More here on ARM v QCOM: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4541671-getting-chippy-arm-...
It contains an ATX motherboard [1] with a StrongARM SA110 CPU, NVIDIA NV1 graphics card, PCI network card, ATA hard disk. Mine runs NetBSD/cats.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/soc/soc.git/...
I get that the FYI directed it to you, but given the HN guidelines I read that more as PSA.
If your definition of PC is "runs Windows" there's a business reason Apple silicon doesn't.
It's rumoured to be because Microsoft made a deal with Qualcomm: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/microsoft-qualcomm-arm-...
So if you want to buy (or build...) an arm PC with Windows then as of today it had to come with a Qualcomm SOC.
So I think the TL;DR answer for your question is really "because Qualcomm aren't super interested in the desktop market".
I think there are now some "mini PCs" but they are not internally expandable etc.
There are no major technical blockers to slapping a Qualcomm dev kit in a desktop case but the experience is not gonna be that great.
There are 24 cores Kunpeng 920 boards available at roughly the same price. The problem is those boards only have two PCI-E slots rather 3 slots on mine.
Really happy with the one I got, as it gives me an inexpensive platform for building & testing ARM64 software, it also give me the ability to install SSDs/NICs that won't be supported by a Mac.
you need to install that Chinese only app on your phone to use it.
Apple has shown what is possible with an ARM-based design, and everyone is now clamoring for M1/M2-level CPUs everywhere.
Somehow everyone forgot that it took Apple 15 or more years to get to M1/M2.
Their first custom CPU, the A4, appeared in 2010, and it takes anywhere from 4 to 6 years to design a new CPU. So it's quite likely Apple started designing their own CPUs... around the time they transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, since before the launch of the very first iPhone.
There. That is the answer to "why ARM-based complete desktop PCs are not available". You need to spend 15 years or more actually working on one, and the only people who have done it are Apple.
Everybody else has only parts of the whole picture. Samsung is probably the only one that has all the hardware, and CPU expertise, but they control none of the OSes.
I'll repost my own comment in a previous thread:
ARM outside of Macs are not beefy. Excluding apples cpus, x86_64 is ahead in perf/per watt. Remember that until 3 months ago, Apple was one CPU node ahead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process#Commercialization
Our school computer labs had BBC Micros, the predecessor to the Acorn Archimedes and all ARM processors.
It’s funny to think back at how quickly that computer was out of date, we only had it a year or so before getting a Windows 95 PC. At about the same time we came back from a school break and all the BBCs were gone, Windows PCs in their place. Now we are all carrying around an ARM in our pockets.
Being from the Cambridge UK area it’s amazing the heritage Acorn produced. About 10 years ago I worked on a project that was being run by the original lead developer of RISC OS. The connections are everywhere.
I always thought, by definition, it had to be intel 8088 compatible to be a PC.
The argument that ARM based computers aren’t PC’s because they aren’t like x86 machines is self-fulfilling.
OTOH, it's the only RISC Unix workstation you can easily get.
An OEM can't just take an ARM CPU, stick it omn a board together with a chipset with UFI on it, bundle a Windows CD and call it a day. The ARM ecosystem is full of weird hacks like the raspberry pi being bootstrapped by the GPU.
Add onto that the rumored Microsoft-Qualcomm exclusivity deal and it just makes the barrier to entry insurmountable. For what? You don't even care about battery life.
Not as pretty as the Macs, but a 2-socket 44-core, 176-thread deskside that's 100% Windows-proof is still quite impressive.
SBC is not a complete PC. I was talking about one which an end user who is not tech-savvy might use.
or the myriad of SBC-based computers like this. The only thing you should do is to install an OS, which is something everybody tends to do and succeed nowadays.
It feels like eeePCs of yesteryear. Underpowered and slow
I think there's also a lack of incentive to come up with new desktop solutions specifically that might be a better fit as well because desktop PC is seen as a shrinking market. Why do a bunch of R&D to compete in a shrinking market along with the difficulty of breaking into the established market, along with all the software compatibility issues etc.?
https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/windows-on-snapdrago...
I left it hooked up to the TV for quite a while for web browsing and youtube. Not bad at all aside from being windows.
Plus any apple machine and the thinkpad x13s
And the raspberry pi
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2020/12/10/introdu...
When Apple announced they were moving to ARM, it was "this is happening and everyone needs to get on board or they're going to be left behind." Microsoft has ARM support in Windows including an x86 translation layer, but there's certainly no "get on board or you'll be left behind" ultimatum. Microsoft intends to keep supporting x86 and in fact x86 will continue to be the premier platform for Windows. That leaves desktop ARM without momentum.
Some things in the world are about momentum and the commitments people are willing to make given the commitments of others. Every Mac developer knew that time invested in porting to ARM would pay off. Apple was committed to ARM. They'd spent a decade making their own chips. They weren't just going to abandon ARM a few years later. Developers knew that competing developers would port to Mac-ARM so they had to make that commitment as well. Developers knew that Mac buyers were going to be clamoring for the Mac-ARM machines.
Does Microsoft care about Windows on ARM? Do Windows Developers? Do PC buyers? The answer to all three seems to be "no" (or at best "eh, a bit"). Given that no one is committing to Windows-ARM, everyone just takes a wait-and-see approach. Without the commitment and direction, others don't want to make those commitments. Would you buy an ARM PC knowing that everything will likely need to run through translation layers? Knowing that Microsoft's support for ARM doesn't even extend to flagship products like Visual Studio? Knowing that so many third-party devs won't see enough ARM users to justify the port? And if you're not going to commit to ARM, why should anyone else in the ecosystem.
Apple solved that indecision/commitment issue by 1) saying unreservedly that it was moving to ARM and would be leaving Intel entirely; 2) offering chips that didn't just match Intel performance, but solidly beat it offering users a huge reason to want those new machines fast.
Microsoft doesn't have either of those and Intel is making huge strides. They've released big-little architecture chips and started improving performance a lot. They're likely to start closing the gap on chip process either by renting TSMC or improving in-house fabs. Plus, "desktop" PC users (rather than laptop) often don't care about heat and form factor like Apple does - they aren't looking for a Mac mini or Mac Studio. They're happy with a tower that they can stick a giant graphics card in and that can accommodate a 100W CPU.
Beyond the issue of commitment, as others have pointed out, Apple is just farther ahead on ARM performance than anyone else. Qualcomm is trying to make their own custom chips to improve performance, but right now Intel has better performance and Intel seems recommitted to maintaining their performance advantage (against non-Apple chips and at least wants to bluster about beating Apple).
Given this environment, it's hard to be the one willing to invest the money to break the logjam. Maybe Qualcomm will if it can leverage its investment in mobile CPUs for desktops. However, it's hard for a chip startup to want to take on Intel when users, developers, and Microsoft aren't enthusiastic about Windows-ARM. It's hard for a user to want an ARM PC when performance isn't dramatically better, developers don't care, etc. It's hard for developers to care without users caring. But I don't think even Qualcomm can break the logjam. I think they like their margins too high to want to price their chips at a level that might see people clamoring for their processors and I think Intel's 12th-gen (and successive generation) chips will make it hard to beat them on performance.
Apple just controlled enough of the ecosystem to offer the amount of commitment necessary - and is a company that doesn't mind telling users to leave their comfort area. Microsoft likes to tell users "don't worry, that program from 1995 will still run" and in some ways that's awesome. A 1995 Mac program wouldn't work multiple times over (when Mac OS X eliminated Classic support, when Apple moved to Intel, when Apple eliminated Carbon, when Apple eliminated 32-bit support, and when Apple moved to ARM). Some of those had translation layers, but some didn't (and often the translation layers died along the way).
The blocker is that no one is committed to Windows-ARM and Desktop-Linux-ARM. I can't even download an Ubuntu desktop ISO for ARM. I have to download the server version and then install the desktop. Without someone standing up and saying "this will be the way forward even if it is uncomfortable and the past will be left behind" it's hard to get people to move.
To put it another way, when Google shows a lack of commitment to things, it means we inevitably see comments here saying "it'll be killed in 2 years." I'm not accusing Microsoft of abandoning anything, but it does feel like Windows-ARM isn't likely to get traction and while they might keep it alive, they probably aren't going to continue to invest the money to really make it thrive beyond what is already offered (which isn't bad). However, the lack of a coordinated direction between Microsoft, developers, and users means that there isn't momentum in that direction. No one wants to waste their money on Windows-ARM.
With linux you might be partially ok, but with Windows you are not ok.
It's not the fault of the OS.
I'm guessing it probably means something like - why isn't there the equivalent of the x86 hardware world, but using ARM? Why can't I buy a CPU and motherboard with modern standard interconnects that I can use for a video card, SSD, etc; or maybe get a beige box computer, but it's ARM-based?
- Microsoft for making an inefficient OS
- Intel because of politics
- Qualcomm because of mediocrity
Apple annihilates the competition, i went with a mac mini personally, that thing is a beast