It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for sustainability. I’m bullish on their business, even if their business model isn’t vertically scalable.
I think that RISC V also has a bright future, but its still a bit far out before its a viable competitor. Still there have been some things that look really promising such as what is coming out of SiFive:
The thing that stands out about ARM is that the user has less control of the hardware. The manufacturers try and succeed in keeping an extremely closed ecosystem.
Why would you want that? The Intel+AMD duopoly seems like nirvana compared to the Ampere and M1.
In fact, Ampere and M1 are a hint of the most dystopian future of computing I can imagine.
Uh... M1 (at least when Mac-fused) isn't actually locked-down. You do have to jump through a few hoops to boot modified kernels[0], but it's a reasonable level of security for a chip primarily intended to go into laptops. There's an ongoing effort to reverse-engineer the M1 and port Linux to it[1], which has actually gone really well.
There's also plenty of ARM hardware out there that really doesn't bother with lockdowns. Raspberry Pi, for example, will happily boot whatever you put on the SD card[2]. There's also plenty of other dev boards and chips that are similarly not locked-down. The reason why people think of ARM as "more locked-down" is because it's more often used in locked-down hardware, but there's no architectural requirement for it to be this way.
The real big problem with ARM is that every chip is very different from one another. SoC designers have a habit of reassigning addresses and IDs on every new chip, with no thought towards backwards compatibility. So even if an ARM chip has no technical protection against third-party operating systems, any Linux kernel you build is unlikely to boot unless the SoC vendor has bothered to upstream support for it. Ironically, Apple is one of the few ARM vendors that actually does maintain backwards compatibility where feasible.
[0] The first admin account is granted possession of a local signing key that lets that user sign kernels. This means that you need to be able to log into that account under macOS in order to install Linux - evil maids need not apply.
[1] Legend has it that if you say "M1" three times in a HackerNews comment, you'll summon the primary developer of Asahi Linux.
[2] You do have to provide a GPU boot blob; no clue if there's a project to reimplement that.
Are there several different manufacturers of motherboards for it?
There isn't even an ecosystem to talk about. The fascination about the M1 is quite disturbing. Unless you want to be locked into the apple store it has no value whatsoever. The energy put into running Linux on it is really impressive. But from a broad perspective nothing positive can ever come out of it.
It's a laptop chip. You can run linux and non-app store applications on it. If you don't want to use it - fine - but others are getting a lot of value out of it.
This has nothing to do with ARM. Unlike the PC there is no standard for system architecture (including boards). ARM based designers like Qualcomm, NVIDIA etc can choose to have their own board and system architecture. For example, they can boot of any memory location or lock the user out of using an exception level like EL3/EL2 etc. That is why the ecosystem looks closed. Nothing stops a SoC designer from giving complete access to hardware.
BTW - any SoC designer that uses RISC-V can do the same.
There are standards like the Arm Server Base System Architecture but companies don't have to follow it. Most of the ARM servers are custom things for big datacenters. As you said the smaller systems like phones and other embedded systems have their own boot systems and memory layout etc.
In the server space, there is no good reason to do weird unusual things → even e.g. the "custom" AWS hardware is as standards-compliant as possible (if you look at the ACPI tables on an a1.metal instance, you'll only find an AMZNxxxx device for the PCIe host controller, and that's only because Synopsys Designware IP sucks^W has a stupid hardware bug related to filtering that requires a little workaround quirk)
Absolutely. Whether it's ARM-based or RISC-V, nothing will stop high-end SoC vendors from developing closed hardware blocks or firmware, especially if they have customers from the DRM space (CA vendors).
AWS offers Graviton instances in a bare-metal way too, so you can see for yourself what the SoC offers. It's quite clean, there is a Designware PCIe filtering quirk (same as on e.g. the Marvell Armada8k) but other than that it's SBSA-style UEFI+ACPI. Very standard system.
In terms of firmware openness, yeah, you don't get the firmware source, but you don't get to touch the machines physically either so you wouldn't have a chance to run a custom build anyway :D
(While Ampere Altras are supported by upstream EDK2, have fun)
I did just say that "you don't get to touch the machines physically either".
What does being able to buy them have to do with.. anything?
The concept of renting a VM is not new. The introduction of processors that a VM hosting company designs exclusively for use on that service is, and the comments in the thread above seem to imply a fear of this causing some kind of lock-in or whatever. What I'm saying is, this is completely unfounded fear. Graviton instances are very much standard machines and you can run the exact same OS images on there as you can on an Altra or a HoneyComb LX2K or a MACCHIATObin. (Yeah, the OS needs a driver for Amazon's network card, but mainline Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD have that.)
Nothing becomes any more closed if you switch the ISA of the CPU used in your VPS to aarch64. The only closed ecosystem here is AWS itself, but what takes power away from you is using non-EC2 services like DynamoDB.
In fact the Arm ecosystem is way more open, because there are SoCs that can run completely blob-free firmware (e.g. from Marvell), which is just not happening with any modern Intel/AMD system.
It was such a hot stock in 2014-15. Softbank kinda bought it at the peak. Still, Apple has proven ARM on the desktop is phenomenal, and Ampere has done the same in the datacenter. Both have swiftly made compiler support accelerate dramatically. I would love for my next desktop to be arm-based, and it would be great if it didn’t NEED to be a mac. Broad adoption of ARM would be a huge win for sustainability. I’m bullish on their business, even if their business model isn’t vertically scalable.
I think that RISC V also has a bright future, but its still a bit far out before its a viable competitor. Still there have been some things that look really promising such as what is coming out of SiFive:
https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-raises-risc-v-performanc...
And Intel just announced a $1B fund for companies building on their Open Foundry RISC-V alliance. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-1b-fund-risc-v
Big things are happening for small instruction sets… watch this space.