Tuxedo on ARM Is Coming | Hacker News Reader

Tuxedo on ARM Is Coming

tuxedocomputers.com

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These guys rebrand Clevo hardware for laptops, (or at least they used to). The article makes it sound like they are designing the laptops themselves. Which is usually how it is presented, and I think it is a bit misleading.

Several other Linux computer companies use Clevo as well.

A lot of those machines get great reviews and satisfied customers. I am not saying that Clevo is bad, I am just stating that they rebrand.

"""The Tuxedo Stellaris 15 Gen4 is a very powerful desktop replacement gaming laptop designed by Clevo. """ https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tuxedo-launches-liquid-coo...

System 76 and a lot of others do the same (rebranding from a contract manufacturer). My recently retired 6 year old machine from them was a rebranded clevo (a fan went a couple years ago and I had to find a replacement). The clevo model# was on the sticker on the bottom. Its lasted and pretty well built.

Many Clevo machines use NVIDIA. The current status of NVIDIA+KDE is flickering under Wayland and stuttering under X11 (source: helping a friend upgrade from Windows last weekend and subsequent search results). Avoid at all costs.

I have had great success with my iGPU AMD System76 and dGPU AMD desktop. Intel is probably fine too.

Yeah, even if they are just rebranding ODM laptops they can still add value by validating that the specific configurations they sell play nice with Linux.

Not to mention they send patches and build applications to help with linux support.

I think the point about Tuxedo is, that they are selling the (rebranded) laptops with explicit Linux support. So you can have the trust, that things work. That is often the truth for many laptops, but few other manufacturers guarantee that.

If Clevo was making Linux-compatible ARM laptops, surely that would be even better news? (Since it would imply that we're about to see lots of very-slightly-differentiated Linux-compatible ARM laptops)

I'm hoping eventually Framework will put out an ARM board for the Framework 13. That's when I'll get an ARM laptop.

Same. I don't use my laptop from 2018 or so that much - so I can wait. I definitely prefer Framework's concept over everything else, but I'm also not impressed with x86 battery life. Guess I have some time to choose between 13 and 16.

I'd rather them do RISC-V, not this ARM distraction.

Is there a RISC-V CPU that is even remotely close to modern high-end laptop performance? Do you know of one on anybody's roadmap even?

Mostly the investment is mostly in high performance servers.

The Tenstorrent one is more broad in use and might be a good fit. But they are not gone focus on laptops.

Tenstorrent Ascalon is their larger, 8-wide core, within an entire family of cores.

The second largest is Alastor, which is 6 wide and might be appropriate for laptops or even phones.

They have even smaller designs.

Can you name a single RISC-V core that has been taped-out with enough single-threaded throughput to enable an enjoyable desktop experience? A 1.5GHz D1 core is a toy and architectural dead end.

>A 1.5GHz D1 core is a toy

What is that? I cannot find anything about a D1 core.

There is, however, a three-year old SoC called D1 using C906 core.

Did you mean that? If so, why highlight such an old design?

>and architectural dead end.

If you really meant C906, then this has already been proved wrong by C908, shipping in Kendryte K230.

That is an improved C906, with the ratified Vector extension.

are there any competitive risc-v CPUs out there?

I don't think ARM would be a compelling enough reason for me to switch from the AMD board, but risc-v with open source firmware, lpcamm2, and ECC would get my pre-order in a heartbeat.

Depends on battery life. A significant upgrade to battery life from the AMD board, something on the order of 16+ hours on a full charge, would do it for me.

Dell claims 27h battery life for Snapdragon XPS 13, https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/dells-new-xps-13...

Which has the same battery size as this machine. Considering my own experience with Linux on laptops (granted with i3 and not KDE) this machine could be a beast in terms of battery life.

Upstreaming Linux kernel support for the Snapdragon X Elite [1]

Mainline Linux on Qualcomm SoCs, are we here now ? [2] (Good talk)

[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...

[2] https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1707-main...

Random data point, I had a laptop from Tuxedo and it was great. Everything worked really well and I got a very powerful machine with 64Gb of Ram for a very good price. I will probably buy one of their Arm laptops.

My favourite laptop I ever owned was from Tuxedo. It was a 17-inch screen diagonal thing with a removable battery and a DVD drive. Unfortunately after about 4 years the CMOS battery died and I tried replacing it myself. Managed to snap the battery holder in 2. Biggest mistake of my life, it's impossible to find another laptop with those specs (17 inch, removable battery, DVD drive).

My first thought was 'that old relic on ARM?'?

No, not the middleware for building scalable multi-tier client/server applications in heterogeneous distributed environments [1]. Phew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuxedo_(software)

Genuine question because I'm out of touch:

Do people actually want ARM laptops? Wouldn't that immediately render a ton of x86 software obsolete?

Yes and no. If you're running *nix, odds are your mostly open-source system will be running software built for ARM. And if you aren't, my understanding is that x86 emulation is pretty good.

Wine can also do this neat hybrid emulation trick. Your x86 application runs in an emulator until it hits a Windows syscall, then it hops out of emulation to run the syscall on native ARM machine code Wine, then jumps back into emulation to keep running your application.

Yes, because a lot of software supports arm now, and arm provides a 2x+ increase in battery life for lots of cases

They’re longing for more battery life. I’ve had a few Linux based laptops. The oryx pro I had about 6 years had an nvidia chip set and could game. But the battery life was miserable (2-3 hours).

But currently get decent battery life from the amd cpu in my new work and home machines. 6-8 hour working the machine quite hard.

If you want an “external” gpu I’m not sure how well that works on Arm.

I have little reason to switch, though I appreciate the competition making everything better.

> Benchmarks from Qualcomm suggest that the new Snapdragon can not only catch up with the competition, but also clearly outperform Apple’s M2 SoCs whilst showing higher energy efficiency.

...

> Adreno GPU with 1.25 GHz

...

> The SoC is not suitable for high-end notebooks or gaming behemoths; it is more suited to business-class workhorses such as the Pulse or the InfinityBook Pro notebooks.

...

Sadly, everything I've read about the Snapdragon X Elite - despite their marketing hype of 'outperforms Apple!' - seems to suggest it is not really competitive with Apple.

For ML, the memory bandwidth is 136GB/s[0] - while e.g. an M2 Ultra is 800GB/s and a RTX 3090 is 900GB/s. The Snapdragon X Elite sits around the memory bandwidth of a Steam Deck (100GB/s)

For gaming, benchmarks[1] seem to suggest an RTX 3050 or M2 Max are 2x better.

Not to mention the Snapdragon X Elite won't be shipped for ~6 months, while Apple is already releasing M4 chipsets.

I'm still excited we're getting decent ARM hardware for Linux, though.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cwsvsk/16_gb_r...

[1] https://videocardz.com/newz/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-adre...

Those performance claim requires a big [citation needed] banner.

They are not competing with MX Max / Ultra though. None of their claims, benchmarks suggests that. They are right now competing with M3

there's been hummus that dGPU support is coming soon. biggest indicator is that there's 8 PCIe gen 4 lanes sitting idle.

> Snapdragon X Elite won't be shipped for ~6 months

? Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon current ship date is June 20, https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13/spd/...

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