Posts by jglathe 109 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2013
hmm... or below-ish. There will be a lot of non-revenue generating kit out there. And gigantic pipelines full of in-production high-end chips. Someone needs to make use of them, and since the Slop has poisoned the pond... others will. We'll see. Asking myself if just optimizing the hardware I already have may be the way for the next years anyway.
Give it time. First cracks are showing, and the recent developments (I do aarch64 bringup and tinkering for 3 years now) point to making existing hardware useful, regardless of the secrecy mindset of its creators/vendors. This will only accelerate. And, enabling local models for mortals / non-corp types.AI giants have their own arena and, quite frankly, issues enough to consume them, and a sizeable chunk of the fraud industry with them.
Its Armv8.x, so should be no issue. Every software that wants to run on these should be built for arm64 or arm64x anyway. Office and Teams run natively (or arm64x which is also native-ish) for years now - doing arm64 since 2023. Only oddball non-supporter I know is EMClient, and FreeCommander XE. Both run well on arm64, though. All other stuff I would need is arm64 native. Even more so on Linux.
I have quite some arm64 hardware here, and overall this is a great experience, on Windows (except sometimes) and Linux (except sometimes). Daily driving the windows Dev Kit 2023 here, almost exclusively on Linux since 2023, and its still adequate. As for the Surface series, they do innovative (another word for strange) stuff with hardware and firmware, and therein lies most of the issues the author described. It's half-baked, and the people responsible are assigned to other projects already, leaving the users hanging with the half-baked product for a long time. You can experience this on other vendors hardware too, but not that often. Happy user of a T14s OLED 64GB (which can only use 32GB-ish on Linux, unless you get the UEFI firmware fix, or use it with EL2) and an Ideapad 5 2in1, and both are fun on Windows and Linux. Don' have much software that needs to get emulated, even Macrium Reflect X has catched up and offers a splendid version that runs on arm64 natively. Only eMClient is still a bit stubborn, but works well emulated.
NPUs aren't that new, but the size and TOPS they deliver now may be. But, old or new NPU, where are the documentation and libraries for it? This should be in the device tree of the SoC. Odd as it may be, I wouldn't care much for Windows, that's big corp's playground if anything. With out this, nobody will touch it unless he's paid for it.
It can run Linux and (depending on effort) all of the available software. Or you compile for it. I have a hp OmniBook X14, and it is a nice machine. Booted Ubuntu 24.04 on it, too. Need to write up the device tree, enable BT, remoteprocs, audio, camera (probably not), Gunyah (alternatively boot-to EL2), NPU. And the support for it that's already upstream or under development is pretty great already.
To be fair, even just with WoA this laptop type is very usable. Instant on, you go a day without a charger, lots of compute power - best used when compiled natively.
I was signed up for the summit, but only remotely. The X13s talk was not streamed, sadly. Next time in person, then... anyway. The X13s is well supported on Ubuntu 23.10, on mine everything works except for touch screen (didn't bother) and camera. Haven't found an installation image, though. Still, some great progress, IMO beyond what was communicated here, too. Integration with USB-C monitor and dock works, but not every combination. I like it.
task manager shows x86, x64, Arm, Arm64, Arm64EC and I assume also Arm64X processes. The OS itself is completely Arm64 AFAICT. The only processes running other Intel archs are some Office helper stuff (Office including Teams is ARM64EC), other small tools, Lenovo Vantage. and some SQL Server stuff brought in from Visual Studio (I guess). Except for EM Client, miniTool Shadowmaker and FreeCommander/XE all software I want to use is available as Arm64. It improves steadily.
Actually, I eyed purchasing one for quite a while, and after some experience with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 on Win11 and with WSL - and getting *that* thing to boot Linux, but not from USB - I bought an X13s, model 21BX001LGE. Windows11 runs nicely, as expected, with the usual settings BS, but it runs well. Most software I need for a hobby machine is already available as ARM64 or ARM64EC - great.
It also runs the aforementioned Armbian 6.3.13, and it does so from SSD. To be fair, to install I actually removed the SSD to an external enclosure (before backing it up completely with miniTool ShadowMaker), did the gparted and other stuff on a wdk2023 (also ARM64, but a RPi4 will also do nicely). Hand-wired the grub start menu accordingly, and it boots and updates as it should. It also boots from USB, although there's still some issues. Didn't come around to the qcom-battmgr userspace component and the ALSA userspace configuration yet. It's fairly usable already.
Regarding ongoing development, the x13s allowed me to crack that USB booting issue on the wdk2023, and I have that running on 6.5.2 already with sound and some power management issues the remaining big blocks (if you don't count nxp and kvm support, which can be way harder). 6.5 has almost all changes required to run either, you mostly need the device trees to boot it. So... not bad?
So much depentds on the common sense approach. Resist the urge to do shortcuts and code changes. If you find yourself in a position where you don't even know what the implementation partner is talking about, change that first before making crippling decisions. Usually you're not the first company with this issue, find out what others did to solve it.
Yeah that's the real world, ofc. Those users talk some sense, and nobody is listening to them, naturally. Well designed frameworks can help a developer (and maybe the advanced, technically interested user) a great deal, Low Code /No Code usually gets in the way. All. The. Time.
Interesting question. For running testing on this ABI, maybe. Maybe customers ask for it. If its cheaper, good. As for running Windows on aarch64... thats one big cf I don't understand. You can run Linux (even GUI) on aarch64 already, for peanuts. I do for fun, and because it is quite power efficient, and you learn one thing or two. Could easily go as daily driver with a big iron in the background. So... maybe a preparation for testing their own migration to other h/w, and monetize it, too.
