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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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I'm conflicted on ARM.
The additional competition is great, but it presents a great risk of PCs becoming more locked down. They don't have an open, standardised BIOS/UEFI like x86 systems do.
Booting alternate OSes on ARM systems can be a nightmare. Usually it's straight up not possible.
I don't want PCs to be like smartphones. I don't want locked bootloaders.
EDIT:
FFS people. I know there are some ARM devices that allow booting of non-official OSes. That's why I said usually.
Even for those devices though, they typically have to use non-standardised firmware (you can't just take an OS for device A and use it for device B in the same way you can take an .iso and install it on any x86 machine), and it requires the OEM to want the device to be open.
Your desire to go "umm ackshully..." and be technically correct over a point I never made in the first place is blinding you to the point I was actually making: x86 is fairly open, standardised, and modular by default. ARM isn't. And all it takes is a look at the phone/tablet market to see that OEMs don't want them to be.
I worry, and I don't think unreasonably, that ARM becoming the standard could mean a further erosion of the openness of PCs.
Don’t be conflicted. RISC-V or GTFO.
“RISC is good.”
Yep it keeps getting faster and faster.
"it keeps getting faster and faster" isn't really saying much when it's 1/10th the performance of a raspberry pi.
Yeah, but RISC-V also costs 1/10th the price of a Pi.
To license the arcitecture it costs a whole lot less, but when it comes to getting an actual usable computer they cost the same or more as an ARM machine, and perform worse.
For micro controllers (currently) it's great.
Oh, I absolutely agree. Licensing is where the big difference is at, but that makes sense though, as ARM and RISC-V are both RISC based processors.
It's loosely akin to comparing AMD vs Intel. Of course, you cannot pop-out an RISC-V and replace it with an ARM. However, the PCB's should contain all the same parts, meaning they'll have both have a similar price.
Unlike Intel/AMD, which you'd need extra capacitor, heat sinks, whatever - to help it handle all that extra power those CISC processors need (which results in heat).
The pi foundation is starting to roll out chips with risc v processors built in. It's extremely cheap and open spec.
One example is RP2350.
More options in computing is better for everyone.
Someone just needs to work on some open-source GPU for it, otherwise it'll still have some of the usual shortcomings of many ARM SoCs.