Fun fact, LibreSOC moved from RISC-V to POWER ISA because of some shenanigans inside the RISC-V Foundation. According to LibreSOC, RISC-V Foundation hides important documentation, communication channels and ressources behind an NDA.
Also, impressed by IBM granting unlimited royalty free licenses to ALL its patents as long as they cleanly implement the POWER ISA spec. All of them. Sick!
OpenPOWER looks like a viable option
And: blobs are acceptable if the company behind it is actively maintains it, which intel usually does. And intel does help a lot with designing the motherboard, cooling solutions and chassis, afaik. Blob free is still prefered tho.
Considering the discussion the previous couple days, I ran across this article today and thought it was interesting. I think we covered everything that needed to be said with regard to Framework and the various CPU offerings, but it provides a tiny bit more background as well as some really good sources in the whole ARM vs. x86 debate.
I really canāt see myself buying any other laptop than an Mac even though I am a hardcore Linux user. The M1 chip is just too good to pass up atm. Linux needs to be more competitive on the laptop front for Framework to have a bright future. We need an Arch based distro designed for laptops that works out of the box.
I really like the Framework laptop, and what it stands for. I will buy the Framework laptop the day it is competitive with respect to battery life and performance to Apple laptops. It can be a little worse than Appleās laptops, but the current margin is just too big to pass up.
The Asus C101P was a fantastic ARM based Chromebook that still performs really well and with the ability to replace ChromeOS with regular Linux, Iād pick it any day of the week over the M1 Apple that could get disabled at any time if Apple feels like it.
I own a Samsung Chromebook Plus - same CPU as C101P - and man, the RK3399 is sloooooooooow. My mother owns an M1 mac, and man, the M1 is fast. The RK3399 is not a CPU Iād put down as āperforms really wellā and on the topic of replacing chromeOS with regular linux, there is still plenty of issues with GPU drivers, and honestly that laptop was simply not fast enough to handle desktop web browsing. I obviously donāt wish to buy an M1 mac, but if I had the choice to use the M1 mac instead of the Chromebook plus which I used for about 2 years as my daily driver in both chromeOS and linux, I would definitely take the M1.
Currently, the M1 is getting some great linux support worked on, with GPU drivers already nearing the level of functionality of the Mali T860.
The difference between the M1 running macOS and the RK3399 running ChromeOS is Apple purpose built one for the other, Google built Chrome for the ARM architecture in top of the mostly mainline Linux kernel, but iirc they only did 32 bit builds even though the RK3399 could do aarch64 aka arm64.
I installed Alarm (Arch Linux on ARM) and it makes way better use of the hardware. Having 4 GB RAM is really the minimum to have a useful system that can multitask well too, and all the background JavaScript from extensions and ads tends to feel slower on ARM due to their mostly in order processing.
Iām sure the RK35xx or a newer Mediatek chipset will feel faster due to improvements in the kernel and other optimizations since then.
