Re:Honeycomb LX2 ARM Workstation: An Alternative to x86
by linux4kix on Friday August 27, 2021 @03:09AM
(#28325139)
socketed Arm SOCs are very unlikely because there are so many vendors making them. This works on the x86_64 side because you basically have Intel and AMD and they each have their own manufacturing ecosystem and target sockets. That is why we chose CEX7 since it is a standard that allows the motherboard to be customized to the use case.
Re:Honeycomb LX2 ARM Workstation: An Alternative to x86
by wmf on Thursday August 26, 2021 @11:08PM
(#28323887)
...until you can buy CPUs and motherboards independently
Ampere Altra is socketed; too bad the motherboard alone is ~$5,000.
standardized BIOS/hardware discoverability
This is solved with SBSA/ServerReady/SystemReady.
The product itself doesn't appear to be particularly new either; their YouTube video is from March 31, 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxdRSCQfhyw), and this blog article is dated February 24, 2021: https://www.solid-run.com/blog/articles/honeycomb-lx2-server... and this "early access sale" (https://www.solid-run.com/news/early-access-limited-offer-ho...) is from June 7, 2019. (You have to go to pages like https://www.solid-run.com/blog/page/3/ to find the dates.)
I don't think ARM chips will take off on "real computers" until you can buy CPUs and motherboards independently. And if that is difficult for technical reasons (e.g., no standardized BIOS/hardware discoverability -- I'm just extrapolating from ARM-based dev boards I have used, maybe this exists on computers like this) then I think it's going to take a long time -- perhaps RISC-V-based "real computers" will appear before that.