I don’t have the fastest ARM machine in the world, but arguably the most open (a MNT Reform laptop) and I was very pleased to see how advanced Linux ARM support is now when I first got it. With a few exceptions, there’s essentially zero things you can do on amd64 that you can’t do on aarch.
And since the only games that interest me are more or less turn of the century or older, it’s plenty fast enough for my gaming needs.
Hey, that’s an interesting laptop, thanks for sharing!
One question about it if you don’t mind. On the website, they position the notebook as “Open Hardware”:
Open Hardware
All sources public
Modifiable & reproducible
However, if I go to the details, I see that the CPU is an ARM Cortext-A76/55. That is not open is it? Not all sources are public for it, it’s not modifiable or reproducible. Is the CPU an implied exception to their statement above? Are you aware of other “exceptions”? Or maybe I don’t understand something? It does look this way though.
It’s as open as humanly possible, is a better way of putting it. Indeed ARM CPUs aren’t fully open. Also, depending on your particular compute module and options, other things aren’t open, like GPU or Wifi driver binary blobs. But the non-open bits are listed when you configure the machine, if this is particularly important to you.
If you absolutely insist on 100% open, there’s theKintex-7 FPGA compute module: you can do whatever you want with it and it’ll be totally open. But the price is… fantastical. But hey, it exists if you have the money 🙂
I don’t have the fastest ARM machine in the world, but arguably the most open (a MNT Reform laptop) and I was very pleased to see how advanced Linux ARM support is now when I first got it. With a few exceptions, there’s essentially zero things you can do on amd64 that you can’t do on aarch.
And since the only games that interest me are more or less turn of the century or older, it’s plenty fast enough for my gaming needs.
Hey, that’s an interesting laptop, thanks for sharing! One question about it if you don’t mind. On the website, they position the notebook as “Open Hardware”:
However, if I go to the details, I see that the CPU is an ARM Cortext-A76/55. That is not open is it? Not all sources are public for it, it’s not modifiable or reproducible. Is the CPU an implied exception to their statement above? Are you aware of other “exceptions”? Or maybe I don’t understand something? It does look this way though.
It’s as open as humanly possible, is a better way of putting it. Indeed ARM CPUs aren’t fully open. Also, depending on your particular compute module and options, other things aren’t open, like GPU or Wifi driver binary blobs. But the non-open bits are listed when you configure the machine, if this is particularly important to you.
If you absolutely insist on 100% open, there’s theKintex-7 FPGA compute module: you can do whatever you want with it and it’ll be totally open. But the price is… fantastical. But hey, it exists if you have the money 🙂