A lot of people here seemed excited for these chips. It’ll be very interesting to see the gaming performance as this could bring in an entire new segment of portable devices running Linux if powerful enough to deliver solid battery life and CPU performance.
It would be great if we could get a steamdeck that runs one of these arm chips.
I wonder if valve is already experimenting with something like this. Maybe another they will have something like box64 too
As the article says, there is no graphics driver yet, so nobody is experimenting with these chips in the gaming world yet in that sense 😉
Maybe somebody is prototyping a Windows platform in the meantime, and I haven’t seen the benchmarks, but I would be surprised if these chips could outperform AMD’s similar APU packages.
When did Qualcomm start giving a shit about Linux? They’ve been on my “hardware and chipsets to avoid if possible” list for pretty much ever.
Since they started targeting the PC segment with these chips to take on Apple’s insanely priced m-class chips, and Amazon and Google’s custom ARM datacenter chips.
They partnered with Canonical to do the first run of development for kernel support in the past year, and now it sounds like they’re moving to get the graphics driver developed and upstreamed.
always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.
From my small experience with Qualcomm in the past, I’m not too hopeful. In a company I used to work for, we wanted to use one of their SoC with Linux, which they claimed they supported. It was many years ago. But was full of closed binary blobs which even when signing NDAs, we couldn’t get the source for. We’re talking user-space drivers, sensors offloaded to a separate core with closed source firmware etc. It’s Linux, but it’s not Linux in spirit, it feels so closed and proprietary and secretive. They’re coming from Android, which google architecturally enabled vendors to close their drivers by utilizing HAL. It’s the single most significant blow to Linux by any corporation so far. It enabled thousands of vendors to close their shitty driver in user-space and not maintain it for newer kernels (kernel driver is just an IO proxy for user-space drivers). I get that without it, there wouldn’t be Android phones we have today, but I expected them to slowly open up. 10+ years later, almost nothing changed, in fact - things seem worse to me.


