this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Eh, it looks like ARM laptops are coming along. I give it a year or so for the process to be smooth.
For servers, AWS Graviton seems to be pretty solid. I honestly don't need top performance and could probably get away with a Quartz64 SBC, I just don't want to worry about RAM and would really like 16GB. I just need to server a dozen or so docker containers with really low load, and I want to do that with as little power as I can get away with for minimum noise. It doesn't need to transcode or anything.
Man so many SBCs come so close to what you're looking for but no one has that level of I/O. I was just looking at the ZimaBlade / ZimaBoard and they don't quite get there either: 2 x SATA and a PCIe 2.0 x4. ZimaBlade has Thunderbolt 4, maybe you can squeeze a few more drives in there with a separate power supply? Seems mildly annoying but on the other hand, their SBCs only draw like 10 watts.
Not sure what your application is but if you're open to clustering them that could be an option.
Here's my actual requirements:
Services:
The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I'll have to look at some performance numbers. I'm a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I'm currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I'd be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I'd really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.
ARM laptops don't support ACPI, which makes them really hard for Linux to support. Having to go back two years to find a laptop with wifi and gpu support on Linux isn't practical. If Qualcomm and Apple officially supported Linux like Intel and AMD do, it would be a different story. As it is right now, even Android phones are forced to use closed-source blobs just to boot.
Those numbers from Amazon are misleading. Linus Torvalds actually builds on an Ampere machine, but they don't actually do that well in benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/graviton4-96-core