System76 Thelio Astra: High-End ARM64 Developer Desktop | Hacker News Reader

System76 Thelio Astra: High-End ARM64 Developer Desktop

phoronix.com

27 pointsgeerlingguy12 comments

Man is that db-15 port on the back of that thing? Lol.

I want one of these just to be different and cool.

Btw the article website is so plastered with ads its totally unusable on mobile. Joke level bad.

$3000+ price tag for a desktop. Wtf? I'd rather buy the already well-established and recognized M3/M2 Max with maxed out specs.

it is an open system

When you pay $3000 for an Apple Silicon machine, you're not paying for the same things as this. Totally different machine, power budget, application, use-case.

edit: ie. sometimes you need a machine with 64+ cores running constantly at 3Ghz, that is very different from a MacBook

> When you pay $3000 for an Apple Silicon machine, you're not paying for the same things as this

Apple actually does have a full-size tower type machine with slots:

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro

I don't think it uses ECC DRAM, though previous Mac Pro models did. They also used to support up to 1.5TB of DRAM (though without the advantages of Apple's current unified memory architecture.)

That's true! - but still, I'm not so sure this is a reasonable comparison to make. If you're buying an Ampere workstation, it's reasonable to assume that your requirements are vastly different from someone buying a Mac Pro, and that the premium on a Mac Pro does not make sense for you! It's still not an apples-to-apples comparison (ha!)

Not any longer, those slots aren't general purpose in latest PRO versions.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/14/mac-pro-pci-card-slots/

What do you mean by that? Do they not adhere to the PCIe spec or something?

As I understand it, the GPU issue is a software/driver issue rather than a hardware issue, so in principle one could create a macOS GPU driver that worked on the mac Pro, or port Linux (perhaps a future version of Asahi) to it and use a GPU that is supported with a Linux driver.

A Mac wouldn't run Ubuntu (would it?)

You could probably run Ubuntu on top of Asashi, but the official Asashi distro is Fedora afaik

Literally any recently made desktop machine with a 64 core processor and 32 GB of ECC RAM will cost that much.

Look up what other workstations with similar specs cost, this is normal pricing.

I'd rather buy an already well-established and recognized gaming rig running Windows 11 Pro, and it is still going to be cheaper than both of those options.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com