- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemdro.id
Qualcomm brought a company named Nuvia, which are ex-Apple engineers that help designed the M series Apple silicon chips to produce Oryon which exceeds Apple’s M2 Max in single threaded benchmarks.
The impression I get is than these are for PCs and laptops
I’ve been following the development of Asahi Linux (Linux on the M series MacBooks) with this new development there’s some exciting times to come.
Qualcomm you say?
I’ll believe it when it ships
Qualcomm is my main fear also. They will ship it with lots of closed source firmware digitally signed with their private keys which users can’t replace so expect a shitty bootloader and don’t forget about always running hypervisior, trust zone and world most kept secret modem
Qualcom is still one of the best CPU manufacturers in the world. Give it a couple of years, custom SOC design is incredibly hard, but I’m sure they’ll come up with something that’ll best the M5 Macbook if they don’t pull some stupid shit.
This being Qualcom though, running Linux on it will be harder than running Linux on Macbooks. We’ve seen what Qualcom does on Android, and it comes down to terrible code that can’t be upstreamed, coupled with an extremely expensive support contract to receive newer versions of their terrible code so you can install some kernel updates
If they treat their SoC like they do their phone SoCs, it’ll ship with Linux 5.0 support and you’ll get kernel updates for five months. You’ll need Raspberry Pi-style custom kernels and custom kernel headers and you’ll never see a newer major kernel version. The GPU will be accelerated if you run Ubuntu 19.10 specifically, because that’s what Qualcom tested, and anything newer will break compatibility. Years after Qualcom stops support, someone will mainline support for the CPU, just in time for it to be completely irrelevant.