
ARM Development for the Office: Unboxing an Ampere EMag Workstation - ksec
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15737/arm-development-for-the-office-unboxing-an-ampere-emag-workstation
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owenwil
I know it's not exactly raw-metal ARM development, but I've been using
Microsoft's ARM-based (SQ1 processor) Surface Pro X for the last few months
for web development and have been _pleasantly_ surprised that the majority of
my stack not only works without tweaks on an ARM-based system, but is very
performant. WSL2 is really unlocking actually using these machines full time!
Particularly powerful has been the new Chromium-based Edge–fully native modern
web browser on ARM, very performant, battery-friendly and rock-solid, which
makes me wonder why Google isn't shipping an ARM-based Chrome port yet, given
it's clearly already building/in use upstream.

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yjftsjthsd-h
> makes me wonder why Google isn't shipping an ARM-based Chrome port yet,
> given it's clearly already building/in use upstream.

Better yet, there are ARM Chromebooks, so it's not like Google considers it
experimental support or something.

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noipv4
I use my Raspberry PI 4 for compiling and testing my ARM code to run on
various screen-less embedded devices. It's surprisingly fast and convenient
and I do not have to bother with a cross-compiler.

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d21d3q
I am running gitlab runner on rpi, which consumes only jobs tagged with
"rpi3".

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notaplumber
I want one of these machines so bad. Would be an epic workstation, but the
price tag is high. OpenBSD would mostly just work on these, as it already runs
on the server boards. It even already has AMD graphics drivers ported to
arm64, and a chromium browser port!

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yjftsjthsd-h
> OpenBSD would mostly just work on these

Open source in general seems to mostly handle different platforms nicely;
other than the odd program that assumes things about word size or endianness
or whatever, it's usually just a recompile away. Heck, NetBSD and OpenBSD
still happily support sparc :)

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gok
I love the idea but damn that's arguably worse port selection than a Raspberry
Pi 4 for like 100x the price, size, and power consumption.

It seems like what people really want is a many-core ARM SoC in a laptop. Turn
most of the cores off when doing simple stuff on battery power, then turn them
on for bursty parallelizable tasks like compiling code.

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TaylorAlexander
256 Gigs of ram and a 32 core 2.8ghz CPU certainly outclass the Pi though.
$3000 is reasonable for businesses, but yeah it’s not quite right for home
use.

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baybal2
I think they will not get much interest at that price point (3000+)

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bluedino
They are similar in price to the Raptor POWER9 systems.

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p_l
TALOS2 and Blackbird have better offering at this price point...

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rayuela
Sooo confused by this. This doesn't seem competitive at all. Is there some
super secret special sauce that's not immediately apparent in the spec sheet?
Who the hell is going to buy this?????

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rjsw
I'm more tempted by one of these [1], clock speed is a lot lower than the
Ampere but I'm limited by RAM on all my current AArch64 systems.

[1]
[https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/](https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/)

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floatboth
Forget clock speed, the worse problem is that these are A53 cores.

I like the Marvell MACCHIATObin, A72 @ 2GHz runs Firefox well enough.

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bitwize
The ultimate RISC OS machine...

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gautamcgoel
How many cores does this machine have?

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flatiron
32: in the article

