I am still waiting for ARM not only be more efficient but also as fast as current high end x86 CPUs. I don't believe it can live up to the hype, yet. With increased performance the efficiency will go down and Ryzen 7000 has shown that there also is room for improvement on the x86 side.. in the end the difference might be marginal and then the major point for decision will be the vastly better situation of existing OSses and software for x86. And the supposed advatnage of smaller and more cores is a very specific thing, whcih IMHO is already exaggerated in it's relevance, when speaking of 'general workstation usage' (despite workstating of course already bering veery specific in itself). As even most 'work related' software just can't make of of many cores.
Wow! What an amazing system Jeff!! When you're into hardware like this, you're in rarified air and you have to figure things out for yourself. Interesting how Linux just loads and boots up and runs perfectly on this. Linux is great!
@@JeffGeerling i think what RISC-V. really needs is a new wine/proton port update for running x86 programs. Before i heard about RISC-V, i knew OpenRISC as a similar architecture, yet never seen a board on it. if they even exist, can you make a video about it?
@@parad0xheart i know that a concept like this doesn't sound that practical, however i believe that if done properly, it can make the RV64 architecture more viable. The problem though is what you've exactly mentioned. Indeed it can be a difficult task, but in theory, it shouldn't be impossible to initiate a project like this; as well as attracting more needed demand for RISC-V
Asahi Linux and Lenovo x13 porting is getting the first steps towards full arm functionality for Linux and Windows even though I Microsoft executive team is the devil in some ways.
@@RustedCroakerI mean it’s not like those things matter for users. I do hope RISCV wins out in the end for that reason, but open-source ISAs are good for smaller designers and manufacturers primarily
Some nostalgia from your commentary, boy do I miss the 2009 Mac Pro. Also, I think my first time building a kernel was around 1998 and was either a Pentium 1 or a 486. Hearing "2 minutes" for a kernel build was crazy.
The craziest bit is that if you have seen the L1Techs content, Wendell is getting under 2 minutes for the allmods compile. I think they're under 20s for just the kernel these days.
@@Jakdaw Right - as a matter of a fact, I believe we talked about a size much smaller than current being unimaginably large. Sort of the Linux version of "No one will ever need more than 64k of ram".
@@Spectru91 Come on, I know they make overpriced, unrepairable, proprietary, locked hardware, which I hate, but they also have some things going for them. You cant's deny their computers just look pretty and the higher end models are quite powerful. My A1398 late 2012 MBP has better specs than my 2015 Asus
This is becoming “the intrusive thoughts won” channel and I love it. I just wanna see Jeff power trough the win installation 😅. He found a working graphics card for the pi after years, he can definitely run windows on the ampere 😊
While maybe a fun challenge it would be basically just for giggles. The software support on WoA is basically non-existant while linux has been there for over a decade (thanks to the pi et al)
Microsoft actually did make the arm build for windows more publicly available recently. This is part of their own in house arm dev kit being pushed out.
You do a great job wasting your time on trial-and-error using the same methods that most of us would do at 3am. Now I get to experience the disappointing result and still get sleep. Thanks Jeff!
This is pretty cool. It would be great if something like Proxmox would add official support for a setup like this. Even 24 or 48 cores would make a worthwhile machine in this kind of setup. Hopefully this is just the beginning of the Arm workstation era!
It's nice seeing crazy machines like this, there are so many ways to do things and I can see how this kind of architecture could be so useful. Also, Rocky Linux is great (that's what I'm running). This channel is where you can see stuff other than what you see all the time.
Trash can Mac 2.0? But more seriously... I still hope Apple doesn't abandon the workstation market again. They've always had compelling (if a bit exotic) hardware on the high end!
@@JeffGeerling It'll be Trash Can 2.0. Because that's the nature of Apple Silicon. The Mac Studio basically fills that niche right now and it's faster than the Intel Mac pro. I think it will just be a bigger Mac Studio
I don’t really see the point. The benefits of PC add nothing to Mac. They could just stick an M2 Max in the Mini and you can get whatever you probably wanted from a Mac Pro and the Studio is a flop. Anything a true Mac Pro would offer, you’d just use a PC or a Linux machine for.
@@MarcoGPUtuber Mac studio can be tackled by other hardware. ( I think you're referring to the new arm stuff ) I thought efficiency was better.. but undervolt any new hardware and you'd get pretty close efficiency. Thought software was better, make a Macintosh. No modularity and proprietary everything is the benefit of mac.
This makes me happy to see adoption of arm for desktop and server. I'm running Fedora Asahi on my M1 and it's improving with each update but still has far to go .
Fascinating video Jeff. Not surprised you can't get windows working, it's windows being, well windows. Nice to see Arm systems coming along leaps and pounds with the possibility of giving the desktop some competition. Glad to see you looking so well.
I look forward to hearing about your GPU experiences but it would also be interesting to probe your software rendering results. Perhaps trying both SwiftShader and Lavapipe and making sure they are configured to use 90+ cores and have SIMD enabled for their ARM compiles. There should be the grunt to push some pixels in a simple game like tuxkart without a separate GPU.
Jeff, have you tried to install a hypervisor (like Xen) and install windows as a guest? Windows installer might be freaking with some option missing in the BIOS (like TPM) and the hypervisor might give a chance to emulate that.
This really is a desktop workstation... it's my favorite machine ever since my laptops burned out with heat... I love workstations for their great performance and small size... Hello in Brazil
Same here! I was thinking of waiting until I had more time to get Windows up and running, but I decided I'd post this video now, then an update on Windows and graphics card support later (maybe late May, after I get a lot more time to test!).
Thanks for reminding me to redownload my Matrix screensaver! That is a really cool system, I am really excited to see what is happening in the world of ARM right now. This is a really interesting and appealing system. Keep up the great work, Jeff!
This looks amazing and I wish I could get my hands on one. With Apple's increasingly terrible record when it comes to right to repair, I think tech-savvy people should make an consious effort to move away from them on to more open platforms ASAP. I would really love to see a machine like this running a RISC-V system in the near future.
Finally! This is the sort of machine I’ve been hoping for. I hope the graphics card situation can be worked out and I hope a consumer grade variant can be produced at a lower cost. I really think ARM is the near future of computers and I think seeing a desktop form factor with reasonable expandability (and graphics compatibility) will be useful and important to convincing the consumer market to give it a try. Apple’s locked down hardware is off putting to a large demographic, but this just leaves software support as the remaining pain point, imo
Thanks for the excellent video. The main issue is that Apple doesn't like to open up their architecture - they prefer a closed, tightly controlled, architecture.
An interesting test I've always wanted to do on a high end arm, run qemu x86 Linux user mode emulation running windows binaries through wine... I think it would be interesting to see how well the multi core architecture of this runs older games, like just for science... Like how does the software renderer for ut2004 look when ran through x86 emulation on this monstrously fast (compared to what it was when the game was written) computer.
I almost fell out of my chair, laughing when I heard the crack about Apple couldn’t justify charging an additional $700 for optional casters! Good one!
The prospect of running Linux on ARM-based devices beyond the scope of low-powered single board computers is truly fascinating. If you happen to have the time / energy & know someone at Lenovo that could send you a unit, it would be interesting to see if you could explore the possibility of installing Linux on the Lenovo IdeaPad 4G ARM64 Snapdragon 8c. I have personally attempted to live boot various Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Debian, on this device. However, I continually encounter an issue where the laptop simply reboots a few seconds after selecting the "try/install Ubuntu" option from the Live ARM64 Ubuntu USB grub menu. This Lenovo Snapdragon laptop battery life is insane on Windows 11, but the device lacks the memory (8GB only) to do much with it beyond browsing, Office 365, and youtube / Netflix streaming.
I've actually got a Samsung Galaxy Book Go 5G which runs the Snapdragon 8cx Gen2 platform. As I understand it, the Linux kernel simply doesn't have support for it. Linux kernel 6.3 adds support for Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but that is different from 8cx or the compute platforms. I REALLY want to run Linux on it. But the kernel support is not there yet.
@@JeffGeerling All that generation of devices including the surface and the devkit are basically the same thing give or take some memory and storage choices.
I’m drooling over this thing so hard, a workstation class ARM system with proper PCIe expansions would be a dream to me. Maybe if I win the lottery I’ll buy this 😛
I'd use it for virtualization and multitasking such as video rendering while gaming, watching a movie, etc. The opportunity is endless. It's a shame there's just lack of resources for that ARM chip to make it run its full potential
It's a shame that getting GPUs working on ARM based systems seems to affect everything from SBCs to this machine. It's odd to me that so many cloud providers are switching ARM based systems, with at least some of them including GPUs I'd assume, yet it's still an issue. Comes across to me as another instance of them taking from the FOSS community but not wanting to give anything back. .
Neoverse-N1 has quad instruction decoders. It doesn't have decoded instructions cache. Only 16-bytes per cycle fetch rate from L1 instruction cache. Apple M1 has octa instructions decoders. Zen 3 has quad instruction decoders (X86 instructions can do more than one function) and a Macro-Op cache feeds 8 Macro-Ops. The L1 instruction cache has 32 bytes per cycle.
Man your videos are a joy. I currently have a M1 Pro MacBook Pro, because to me it's the best laptop out there in terms of efficiency, but my desktop is a Ryzen 5900X and I am often looking at horrendous efficiency and in Germany electricity seems to be a luxury with prices of 32-45 Euro Cents per kilowatt-hour.
1:46 Let me just nitpick a little, but AKTSCHUALLY there is no NVMe slot. It's M.2 and NVMe is the protocol for drive access over PCIe. M.2 just carries PCIe signal :p Great video as always!
Cool machine but I'm just not excited for arm cores at the desktop at this time. This is probably because I've only used raspberry pis or cloud based servers with arm, and I'm hard pressed to pay the prices Apple wants for a Mac mini when I already have a first gen Epyc 24 core server and a 3900X desktop. I'll eventually get around to it as I like efficiency but I really like the native backwards compatability of x86 too.
That is awesome!! Great video, I would love this as my next desktop. I usually build my own x86 machines, and the cost will hurt but seems so worth it!
I'm pretty sure Apple can't do this, even for an extra few zeros per machine. As for them to create something so user friendly and expandable would kill all the decision makers that have for years been sticking the pointy end of a sharp object into their userbase.
Apple’s not going to do this. They are saying goodbye to upgradeability, because that’s the only way they can achieve performance. Which means goodbye to the workstation market.
@@JeffGeerling that would be awesome! The Ampere systems in general seem hard to find. IT Creations quoted me an 8-10 week lead time on the R282-P91, but said they had a R282-P92 (3.5" drive model) available at end of May.
If you have a volume licensing agreement, you can get the release ISOs for Windows 10/11 for arm64. I uh... have those if you want them. I've used them to install Windows 11 on my Galaxy Book Go. Fun thing is that I had to pull drivers from the built in recovery wim that was preinstalled on the machine, and copy them to the installer/boot wim in the ISO. Without adding the drivers my Galaxy Book Go doesn't have functional USB/Keyboard/Trackpad for installation. Even better is that Samsung doesn't provide any way to do an ACTUAL fresh install. Definitely not the experience you get with x86.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Am I misusing it by installing it on my Galaxy Book Go with the inherited “digital license”? They don’t provide the iso because it literally won’t work on most ARM devices without shoehorning drivers into the boot/install WIMs. If you install it but don’t activate it, my understanding is that you’re not actually violating any terms.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Is the license different for x64 and arm64… serious question. Because they allow you to copy the x64 iso. I think once UEFI implementation and ServerReady become normal on Arm, they’ll likely just provide it just like x64.
Right now there's not a lot of RISC-V 64 bit systems out there for end users - and none with the kind of PCIe connectivity datacenter / workstation systems require.
@@jnelson4765 Well someone with the technical know how could make such a system (the necessary extensions to RISC V architecture to make it possible) and could contact services like Europractice MOSIS(who offer middle man services where they help companies , tech faculties of universities and governments share the cost of semiconductor manufacturing by getting chips made from the same silicon wafers) to have semiconductor prototypes manufactured by foundries (TSMC, Intel , samsung ect) and have a complete computer system made by companies like compal , quanta computer and foxconn. With enough funding it's possible
My dedicated C++ laptop runs Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS). Though it’s an x86-64 CPU (i7-12700H). My experience overall with Linux has been fun and a *lot* of learning about computing in general. As I’m searching for a junior backend dev job in Java it’s going to be useful I suspect.
They could make L1 level RAM integrated with CPU and L2 level RAM which would be on a slot so it would be upgradable. CPU would use primarily L1 RAM but could always access bigger but slower L2 RAM.
Wow! I look forward to more on this ARM desktop (in a tower case…strong nostalgia for those). Your very NEXT episode is bound to be a real winner and a revealing watch! Above all, though…take good care of your health. Aloha!❤
Hope this can push chipmakers to focus more on efficiency. It will really be interesting if Apple make M-chips workstation. These could bring more impact than their corporate's own carbon neutral spending
Sadly gone are the days of Apple being interested in any architecture allowing end users to anything but buy a new device to increase their computing power
This kind of setup isn't unprecedented either; Apple used to have processor daughtercards in the G3/G4 era (and earlier), and upgrades were annoying but possible (Sonnet used to make a ton of them). I still see the odd G4 or G5 upgraded beyond its initial specs living out a longer life.
Your shirt supporting Rocky Linux reminded me of that "standards" meme and replaced the word: "Why are there so many Linux Distros? We should make a new one to universalize everything between them." (Loop)
Definitely not a bad deal for what you get. Might want to throw in a midrange graphics card to complete it, but I still haven't gotten around to testing any yet.
To be fair, take two large server rooms of the same size then fill one up with rack mounts then fill the other up with these boxes. How many servers per space you think you will get over the other? You’re paying for more servers per space. Rack mounting is not for everyone clearly.
Interesting stuff… Apple is not really doing themselves any favors by maintaining an isolationist position and excluding others from adding value to their platforms, or even for users to perform upgrades. Something really odd about this approach. I am an Apple user, but I find it really difficult to stomach this - they’re even doing everything that they can to stop right to repair as well, so it is just a little crazy… Anyway, that looks like a real cracker of a machine, and provided that it runs LinuxMint, which I’m sure it will, I would be more than happy to use it. Sadly out of my budget right now… Thanks for a great video and perhaps by the time you are ready for your next one, you will have heard from MS… 👍🙂
I'm no expert, but I think the biggest issue in the way of mass adoption of ARM on desktop/laptop platforms is software. I think that Apple's M-Series computers have proven that the software hurdle isn't as big of a problem as it's thought to be. Especially with their Rosetta software that does "live" translation between X86 and ARM. I legitimately think that we're in a catch-22 scenario where we need really good translation layers to be able to justify switching to ARM, but we also need good ARM systems to develop good translation layers. I'm no expert, but if the Steamdeck and Linux's Windows compatibility layers have taught me anything, it's that it's worth taking the time and energy to invest in developing those compatibility layers.
There’s no reason for Apple to have any desktop computer with PCI express slots, since they no longer support dGPUs. Also, IIRC there’s some chip errata that affects the performance of dGPUs on the ampere chips. There’s a patch for it but the patch is basically a software workaround, and slows things down considerably.
I absolutely can't wait for ARM to go mainstream. I really badly want an egpu ARM laptop for gaming and for on the go. And as much as I love Linux and Apple, I'm especially looking forward to Windows support. There are just some things I can't do involving socks5 gaming connections through wine (gaming to overseas servers) that work just effortlessly via apps like proxifier and ExitLag (etc) for gaming on Windows. Thank you for this insightful video! Really cool stuff!
I have an ARM server as my home server with similar expansion. Mine doesn't have 96 cores though. Lol. I went with ARM because it's so much more efficient and takes less cooling. Making it quieter and use less power keeping my electricity bill down. I use it as my NAS, DNS, VPN, and Home automation server. Plus I can run docker containers for just about anything.
as a mac user who doesn’t have a server but sometimes watches pc building content for entertainment (watercooling is pretty cool) i’d love to see apple offer that sort of product. even if it was just being able to buy a M3 whatever from them on its own to stick into something else. if they can make it usable in that way, i think they’d get some users if only for its great efficiency and ability to emulate x86 really well
This is exactly the move. A full size PC platform is THE way to get developer buy-in. When SiFive or Esperanto have competitive RISC-V cores, a PC should be a priority.
