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Linus: '2016 Will Be the Year of the ARM Laptop' (softpedia.com)
jones_supa writes: Linus Torvalds took the stage at LinuxCon Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and talked about a number of things, including security and the future for Linux on ARM hardware. There is nothing that will blow your mind, but there are a couple of interesting statements nonetheless. Chromebooks are slowly taking over the world, and a large number of those Chromebooks are powered by ARM processors. "I'm happy to see that ARM is making progress. One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM. They said it would be this year, but maybe it'll be next year. 2016 will be the year of the ARM laptop," said Linus excitedly. He also explained that one of the problems now is actually finding people to maintain Linux. It's not a glorious job, and it usually entails answering emails seven days a week. Finding someone with the proper set of skills and the time to do this job is difficult.
Finally! The year of Linux on the laptop!
I had a Chromebook with an Exynos 5 and wasn't that great, in addition to the hoops I had to jump through to install Ubuntu on it.
I traded it in for a Celeron Cromebook, which is faster. Much better experience, plus the i915 graphics driver is much more mature and has video acceleration support.
This Sig does not Exist.
Of course the stream of abuse probably doesn't help...
Hmm... could the fact that Linux maintainers keep quitting because they get tired of dealing with assholes have something to do with the problem that it's hard to find people to maintain Linux?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There is some speculation that Apple will eventually ditch Intel and start using their own ARM chips at some point in the future. I don't think they'll do it next year, but I'm willing to bet that they'll have a non iOS product using an ARM SoC by 2020. Remember that before they went to Intel, Mac OS used IBM's POWER architecture and that they had an internal build of Mac OS that ran on x86 in development for years before it was ever released. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see that they were doing the same thing with ARM.
Almost all cellphones have an ARM-based CPU. Only a handful have an x86 CPU.
I would be fucking amazed if Apple hasn't had an ARM desktop/laptop for a while now internally.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The issues about working with assholes aside, I suspect the life of a maintainer is difficult, not because it is too stressful, but because there isn't a good way to rotate the burden across people and time. Maintainers take on this enormous burden (and love it..for a while), and then they get burnt out. But then what? Is there an exit strategy? Do they train their successor? Is there a retirement home for maintainers? Can they come out of retirement and contribute? (perhaps at a lower level).
Building the infrastructure that allows people to move through the lifecycle of a maintainer so they always know there are people to follow them and a well established role for them to walk into.
Sort of like life. You are born, as an adolescent you play a bit, then you become an adult, get a family, career, young kids, and find yourself stressed out. Eventually they go to college and you downsize, perhaps getting a less stressful job to be near the grand kids. Then you retire, still visiting on weekends. And then you die.
Build an environment where this kind of support system exists and is encouraged (and perhaps be a little bit less of a jerk -- You can be forthright and honest without eviscerating people), and I suspect the system of maintainers will be better and more robust than any individual might be.
Mike
And Microsoft has an ARM version of the NT Kernel. The problem is never the OS, its the fact that the software for x86 can't run on ARM. So no Apple won't have an ARM laptop till they have the programs to run on it. Does Adobe have ARM versions of their offerings?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
I think the hold up is that ARM needs to be comparable in terms of computing power to Intel.
I don't think "comparable" is sufficient. I think that to switch an OS where people primerally use propeitary native code to a new incompatible CPU architecture the new processors have to be substantially more powerful to offset the performance cost of the emulation.
I find it unlikely that ARM will ever make a processor that is substantially more powerful than a regular desktop/laptop intel chip.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
When Apple changed from 68K to PowerPC and from PowerPC to x86 there was a large jump in CPU performance each time. This allowed for the overhead of emulation without performance suffering too much. That performance jump doesn't exist now. In the best case ARM keeps up with the lowest end Intel chips, and Apple doesn't use the lowest end. ARM simply does not have the CPU grunt to emulate x86 without a massive performance hit.
"Like we're going to listen to a 6-digit UID noob on fucking Slashdot for advice on how to run our shit."
I trust him more than a 7 digit N00b that has a potty mouth.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
With our Chromebook, we've found that there are certain tasks that you want to do on a little 10 inch notebook, and certain tasks you don't. On a small laptop, a processor good enough for YouTube and Netflix is good enough. You don't want to run Visual Studio on a 10 inch device, so there's no need for a Core i7.
Obviously, it doesn't matter to you that a supercomputer is faster than your desktop, if your desktop is fast enough. Similarly , if an ARM is fast enough for the things you do on a small laptop, it doesn't matter whether Intel offers a more capable processor or not - if the ARM suits your needs, that's enough.
That's not how Apple development works. You code to their API using their dev tools and their compiler, and they will take care of it for you.
It sounds wild, but look at their history.
Apps built on Cocoa only needed a recompile to run on the new CPU arch when they switched to x86. Carbon-based apps could be a little more involved because it was their older API.
Yes, they had Rosetta, but that was only to translate unsupported legacy applications.
Actually, their whole migration to x86 impressed me more than the iPhone ever has.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Looking at the latest in the ARM landscape, we have Apple A9, Qualcomm Kryo, ARM A57, ARM A72, and AMD A12. We can probably expect a small jump in Apple's performance next year along with a second revision of Kryo, but nothing competitive with Intel. A57 is being dropped for the fixed A72 since Apple screwed over ARM (tl;dr Apple shipped a new architecture in 2 years while ARM took almost 4 years for an inferior product -- everyone in the industry knows that design to shipping a new architecture is 4-5 years indicating either ARM screwed over all their non-apple partners (and themselves) by giving Apple a head start or Apple forced ARM to adopt a new ISA when they'd already had a couple years to work on int). Of all these architectures, I think only A72, AMD's A57 implementation, and AMD's A12 are worth focusing on.
A72 is supposedly close to the performance of Intel's core M processors, but I'm willing to bet that the default A72 can't actually compete with Skylake's wide dispatch, SMT, and vector units. The biggest question in this area isn't actually the CPU so much as all the "uncore" parts surrounding it. Even if it could have these things in theory, the companies controlling most of the patents in this area aren't using the A72 (AMD, Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc).
AMD's first generation of ARM processor (launching next year) is an A57 server part, but is probably going to be faster than most A72s in practice because it can be manufactured on a high-performance (rather than bulk) fab process and will have faster buses, faster memory, much larger caches, and even some parts of the core (like the branch predictor) may well be replaced with better systems while AMD's reworking the entire architecture for the new fab. This chip will probably be competitive in the low-power server market, but most likely won't be aimed at anything mobile.
Not much is known about AMD's A12, but for the first time, an ARM company seems to be moving into the higher-performance mobile segment. AMD failed with bulldozer (and has taken the heat for beating that dead horse for the past few years), but they at least had the sense to hire Jim Keller to help them make a couple new, next-gen architectures. While AMD has money troubles, it's in the intellectual property sweet spot to be able to put together a competitive chip. This is the chip I think Linus is wanting, but it's been pushed to 2017.
The complete unknown is Intel. They bought DEC and StrongARM was along for the ride, but they sold it in '97. They then made XScale only to sell it to Marvell in '06. I find it hard to believe that Intel's not experimenting with ARM design again. Even if they could make x86 compete in the low-end (atom has been a failure in that regard), convincing companies to switch will probably prove impossible as the current situation with lots of competing CPU providers works to their fiscal advantage. Apple won't be giving up the freedom to make their own chips (nor will Samsung). That said, I don't think we'll be seeing an Intel ARM chip before 2018-19.
tl;dr -- the current chips can't compete with Intel. The ones that can don't launch until 2017 or later.
The PowerPC was significantly more powerful than the 68K line, and I believe the Intel chips were significantly more powerful than PowerPC when they switched over. Moving up in power is complicated, since Apple insists on a smooth transition. Moving down in power would have many more problems.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It's the netbook argument all over again -- most people's use case for laptops is web and email, and it doesn't really matter what processor or OS the laptop is running as long as it works with most websites and email sends and receives ok. There are assumptions there -- that video and other resources used by websites work correctly -- and there's room for some specialized apps like Netflix, but that's pretty much it.
So Linux on ARM as a laptop? Sure. And it'll almost certainly be more reliable, run faster on equivalent hardware, and meet most people's needs who own laptops. There's no technical reason this couldn't happen.
The reason it won't happen is that there's this ninety billion dollar company and this other one hundred eighty billion dollar company that both have a vested interest in this not happening. And they're really good (at least so far) at making sure it doesn't happen.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The big selling point for Microsoft is that Windows will run all your busted old shit. So more busted old shit is constantly created and ported to the current MS platform to become the new 'busted old shit' that people need to be able to run on new machines.
Until this cycle can be broken, there is zero incentive for microsoft to fully commit to any new architecture, as their major selling point will go away.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.