I’ll believe it when someone has put a discrete GPU in the slot that runs with open drivers and no hacky workarounds for the PCIe bus.
There’s a video by Jeff Geerling where he did this:
Watched this yesterday, seems pretty cool but I won’t buy due to it …uniqueness. Hope it get flushed out with firmware updates. If it was around $300 I would buy it. I rather buy a Mac Mini at that price point or play with Pi5s
Jeff Geerling toilet papered my house last week.
My brothers… 64GB RAM for $500?? This will look like a steal in 2 months. On top of that you get all the extra bits /s?
I don’t think ARM based hardware makes much sense for a desktop, even a mini PC. There are plenty of x86 based mini PCs that are doing just fine. But, ARM based makes so, so much more sense for mobile devices, and just anything that runs on a battery, like a laptop. I would love to see an ARM based Steam deck, for instance. Sure, it wouldn’t necessarily be as powerful, but it would be lighter, quieter, and the battery life would be much better.
Bad power efficiency of x86 is more a tuning choice than an architecture one. However, the Van Gogh APU is quite efficient for its age. It’s just old.
…And you could just power cap it if you want more battery life for less performance.
AMD currently doesn’t offer anything else like the Steam Deck APU (as they canceled that APU silicon line), but if they do again, it would be very efficient heavily throttled. More efficient than new ARM SoCs (which would have to run at higher clocks/voltages for the same performance).
Hell yeah! I’d love to put a GPU inside a computer that can’t play graphics intensive games!
I’ve never actually tried gaming on Linux for ARM, but there do seem to be some games:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Linux_ARM_games
But this list doesn’t seem to be complete as it doesn’t include Doom3.
Extremely cool, but at least for the time being for me also completely useless.
Let’s see where this goes. I’m sure Jeff Geerling will teach us all how cool this could wind up.
Edit: Nevermind. He’s already posted about it, lol
Because it’s ARM? Software support is much better now than it was even 5 years ago, plus this looks like it has enough horsepower to virtualize x86
I’m not opposed to it I just don’t think it has an application for me, YET
I’m behind on all this. What desktop OS runs on ARM?
Debian, Ubuntu, Arch. Hell, even windows runs on arm now unless you need nvidia drivers.
Jeff geerling’s video said Ubuntu automatically pulled the correct nvidia drivers on the arm distro, but debian wouldn’t. Not necessary if you’re using the igpu tho
Linux, what else? 😉
