this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
200 points (94.2% liked)

Technology

60055 readers
3735 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] WhoRoger 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does everything run on ARM? Steam, Wine, stuff like that? Are the power optimisations as good on Linux/ARM as on x86? Not saying they aren't, but I imagine on a laptop replacement thingy x86 makes sense due to this kind of support.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Are the power optimisations as good on Linux/ARM as on x86?

ARM chips use less power, that's kind of the whole point.

[–] WhoRoger 7 points 1 year ago

The processors do, that doesn't mean the desktop Linux distributions are well optimised for it. The available Linux phones have garbage battery life and a bunch of other issues.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This isn't necessarily as true as it once was. X86 has made a lot of ground in power efficiency and ARM has made a lot of ground in performance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Intel chips are still quite hot and use older process nodes which are less efficient. They have been pushing performance over efficiency recently as well. If this was AMD hardware on N5 I would agree with you, but sadly it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's true in general, but Intel Atom is quite promising IIRC, and efficiency cores + improvements to their fabs should only continue to improve the situation.

I'm not saying the old logic of "ARM is efficient, x86 is fast" isn't still true, but it's becoming less true, and they're kind of converging to be similar chips but with different starting points (i.e., the needs are becoming more similar, and the differences are becoming lesser).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm not saying the old logic of "ARM is efficient, x86 is fast" isn't still true

Okay then I will say it. Apple Silicon is almost as fast per core than Intel and AMD. I am not talking just about x86 vs ARM in general because that's a fools errand. I am talking about Intel. That's also not an Atom chip, they don't make Atom anymore. Sure it is made of E cores but those are several generations removed from the Atom chips. It would actually make more sense imo if they used the 8 core version of that chip.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s not really the use case for a tablet. It'd be nice to run Android apps, but I think that’s possible on Linux on ARM.

[–] WhoRoger 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As long as something is running a desktop OS, anything is a use case for it. Maybe that's exactly the point why it's x86. It has a 12" inch sceeen after all, so it's not like it's just a mini 8" tablet you take to bed to watch vids before sleeping.