The road isnt really paved, everyone took their own path. You have to commit to your arm64 hw platform.
There are quite a few arm64 laptops, hybrid tablets, even towers. But I can’t predictably decide which one I want because hardware specs and drivers for arm64 are almost all different, which is the same problem with riscV getting more adoption.
However, the work of giving owners more options for Linux on arm64 is good, just like the surface Linux kernel for ms surface products.
Arm has been slowly pushing standardisation for the firmware which solves a lot of the problems. On the server side we are pretty much there. For workstations I’m still waiting for someone to ship hardware with non-broken PCIe. On laptops the remaining challenge is power usage parity with Windows and the insistance of some manufacturers to try and lock off EL2 which makes virtualization a pain.
The road isnt really paved, everyone took their own path. You have to commit to your arm64 hw platform.
There are quite a few arm64 laptops, hybrid tablets, even towers. But I can’t predictably decide which one I want because hardware specs and drivers for arm64 are almost all different, which is the same problem with riscV getting more adoption.
However, the work of giving owners more options for Linux on arm64 is good, just like the surface Linux kernel for ms surface products.
Arm has been slowly pushing standardisation for the firmware which solves a lot of the problems. On the server side we are pretty much there. For workstations I’m still waiting for someone to ship hardware with non-broken PCIe. On laptops the remaining challenge is power usage parity with Windows and the insistance of some manufacturers to try and lock off EL2 which makes virtualization a pain.
We’ve been “almost there” for 10 years. Ampere was supposed to come in scaled-down versions for laptops and workstations, but we never saw those.
I’ve got an Ampere workstation (AVA) which from a firmware point works fine. They may even fix the PCIe bus on later versions.