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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.

Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.

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If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.

It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.

> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.

Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?

Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).

Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.

They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.

If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.

What specific quality issues did you notice? I haven’t heard of any, but I wasn’t paying close attention at the time.

The Qualcomm models were faster. I’m not sure if they were better in low signal conditions.

The Intel models were worse, but they weren’t bad as far as I know.

They must think they will sell more chips to OEMs that want to offer Linux. It's not like they're going to be shaking down Debian for cash.

I'd have assumed Qualcom are looking at the Steam Deck / Steam Machine and Steam OS, and thinking: "I might want some of that."

And looking at the direction Microsoft is going, and thinking: "Shackling our laptop and desktop chip sales to this is a bad idea."

The entire landscape outside of the Raspberry Pi is a shitshow in terms of "Just download a distro for your device class and arch and it'll work."

Arm SystemReady appears to be a slow push in the right direction from the opposite end.

> Apple gets lazy on top.

A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.

Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".

I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.

Well, since an adequate cooling solution is a part of a machine's feature set for me, my point still stands.

Well I guess you could summarise your point as "Performance doesn't matter".

Which is fine. Have a great day.

Gud lorde, don't be daft. PPW matters until it hits a point where any optimizations above that line are of much less importance to some people (e. g. me) than other specs. Not to speak of necessary attributes completely absent from your PPW dream machine, which indeed negates PPW considerations on a per device/device-class basis. Which excludes optimizations for microprocessor series. It ain't rocket science.

basically: "I want WSL for my overpriced toaster, I'm totally fine with the keyboard lacking most of the essential keys, pretty please. whispers expletive against Apple whilst making sure no one can hear him"

I wasn’t thinking hardware, more software. But either way the closer a competitor is the harder they’ll run, even if still on top.

Those that dream of an ARM ecosystem don't realise what they are getting.

Finally the end of IBM PC clones is taking shape.

And how exactly does that matter? How close do you have your head to x86 assembly for the instructions set to matter?

A computer is much more than an CPU chip, e.g. "PC 99 System Design Guide", among several other references.

But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?

Again, a computer isn't a chip with nothing else.

In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.

The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.

In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.

I know I will never switch to ARM willingly. There is no advantage, only vendor lock-in. I feel that x86's openness was an accident, and we should try to keep x86 alive as long as possible.

It actually was an accident, enabled by IBM using off the self parts unlike their previous computers, and Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS.

ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.

There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.

It's an Acorn microcomputer, I know this!

What makes you think if one ARM manufacturer gets popular ‘clones’ won’t pop-up again?

One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.

People bought IBM clones to run the same software, not for the love of the architecture.

If ARM processors are regularly incompatible and segmented, we all lose out and end up in isolated silos.

I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.

For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.

Me too. Not a fan of Qualcomm, though.

>And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors

What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.

I had Fujutsu laptops that were far lighter and smaller than Airs, touchscreens in the late 90s, convertibles, 2 in ones, touch bars (Thinkpad). Plenty of designs that don't build around ATX type specs, and things that do (open frame cases, and the vast array of expansion cards that benefit from it). PCs that snap onto a monitor. Things Apple copied or hasn't gotten around to yet then claim then as revolutionary. Apple has more integration and can be more strategic (when they don't need bailing out), but as one company they do far less exploration.

There have been a few cool ideas from PC makers I'll grant you that, but looking at the offerings from the 4-5 largest PC makers today it basically looks like it did 20 years ago.

I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.

Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!

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