Linus Torvalds Now Favors Ampere Arm Chip over Apple Silicon MacBook | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds Now Favors Ampere Arm Chip over Apple Silicon MacBook

tomshardware.com

47 pointsdoener16 comments

This feels like a lot of editorial for an original source that only contains this:

> And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too. The M2 laptop I have has been more of a "test builds weekly" rather than "continuously".

> Not that I really expect that to really show any issues - the laptop builds never did - but I feel happier having a bit more coverage.

indeed, and it also doesn't actually say he 'prefers' anything. He just says that the more powerful machine allows him to do more builds. To me this implies just that the M2 builds took too long for effective continuous integration.

Is it a surprise that Linus, one of the most widely known Open Source people in the world, would favor an open/standard chip (Arm) over a proprietary/unsupported chip (Apple Silicon)?

Your question is also obviously unexpected.

Linus famously worked for a while for a closed chip startup called Transmeta.

...and was famously miserable as a manager there.

ARM isn’t open either, it’s a proprietary ISA owned by ARM holdings, inc.

RISC-V is an open ISA.

Faced with 8 cores vs 128 cores¹, I would do the same in Linus's shoes.

[1] maybe

If you don't need to lug the box around or care about battery life, a beefier box is a better box. Especially when you need a lot of compute, as when you run.a CI/CD pipeline.

Is it aarch64 or Arm64?! Why are we so inconsistent?

Well if you believe the ARM people, these are not the same thing.

Ah AArch64 is official name from ARM https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0600/ac

Interesting. I thought it was Apple name.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/47274698

it seems apple used arm64 with their chips, but most linux refers to aarch64.

Maybe it's because arm64 has a trademarked name and apple is part of that?

aarch64 doesn't use directly use ARM in the name.

Same with x86_64 and x64

Article about processors, architectures and Linus' career and not a word about Transmeta? Missed opportunity.

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