this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
997 points (99.5% liked)

Technology

59377 readers
3239 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that's what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it's plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.

Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There's been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let's just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.

Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can't paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.

Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 months ago

GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don't work with a recent kernel.

For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.

Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that's been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.