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.
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.
You are very wrong here. They open-source a lot of things and they even used to have their own open-source modified version of Android for their phone chips.
OK, correction accepted. I probably did conflate them with Broadcom. Someone should let those ubuntu folks know though… ;)
Oh it’s ok. Broadcom is a very bad company in terms of open-source and Linux support. Their most known products are WiFi modules for laptops. Qualcomm on the other hand is probably one of the most open-source friendly commercial companies and it’s known for very popular mobile processors such as the Snapdragon series.
always? Android runs a linux kernel, and they support all kinds of embedded systems that run Linux.
I’m sorry for leaving out the word “desktop”. I’m well aware that Android runs the Linux kernel and that many embedded systems run Linux.
Possibly I conflated them with Broadcom, but I feel sure I recall Qualcomm’s lack of openness being problematic in the past also.
Edit - yeah, folks jumping through hoops for their wifi at least as recently as Ubuntu 20.04. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1277359/my-qualcomm-atheros-qca9377-wireless-adopter-is-not-working-in-ubuntu-20-04-lts
ah yeah. maybe less well known, but i had a dev kit from Qualcomm that came with Ubuntu
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.
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.
