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.
AWS’ benchmark is about lambda functions, not compile workloads, which are quite different beasts. Lambdas are about running a lot of small (so task switching), independent scripts, whereas compiling is about running heavy CPU workloads (so feeding caches). Server workloads tend to be more of the former than the latter.
That said, I’m far less interested in raw performance and way more interested in power efficiency and idle and low utilization. I’m very rarely going to be pushing any kind of meaningful load on it, and when I do, I don’t mind if it takes a little longer, provided I’m saving a lot of electricity in the meantime.
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
AWS’ benchmark is about lambda functions, not compile workloads, which are quite different beasts. Lambdas are about running a lot of small (so task switching), independent scripts, whereas compiling is about running heavy CPU workloads (so feeding caches). Server workloads tend to be more of the former than the latter.
That said, I’m far less interested in raw performance and way more interested in power efficiency and idle and low utilization. I’m very rarely going to be pushing any kind of meaningful load on it, and when I do, I don’t mind if it takes a little longer, provided I’m saving a lot of electricity in the meantime.