Discussion
It's kinda weird that Apple are able to put out class leading new CPUs pretty much every year and AMD put out the 16 core 9950X in Aug 2024, slightly tweaked it with the 9950X3D in Dec 2025 and apparently have nothing in the works for 2026. Meanwhile you can get 18 core Snapdragon X2 SoCs in laptops and a 36 core M5 Ultra in a tiny Mac Studio.
This message brought to you by my desire to have more cores in my existing AM5 desktop.
@ahornby I considered it when I built this system in 2023, but it did not fit in budget so went for AM5 thinking there would be more regular updates.
@wezm at least you should get one next year for am5|. threadripper is due to go to a different socket
if Linux worked on one of the recent mac studios that would be quite tempting, rdimms so expensive can buy a used Mac Studio for same price as the same capacity rdimm
@ahornby the Mac Studio is pretty compelling, but I decided not to give Apple any more of my money a couple of years ago.
@wezm they only compete with I fail. AM5 has not enough Memory bandwidth to reasonable punch much higher with more cores. That's what Threadripper is for 🤷🏻♀️
They don't want us to have nice things☹️
@TheOneDoc Well they don't seem to be competing very well when Intel has 24 core parts (although unsure how their 8 performance, 16 efficiency cores compares in practice).
@wezm I don't use it often, but I picked up one of those 2023 Windows Arm DevKit boxes. 8 core Snapdragon, 32gb ram, 512gb nvme. It runs great when I do fiddle with it.
I only use it via RDP so I can't speak to support for gaming, whether emulated or native builds.
I'd love to see the ability to do big beefy custom desktop builds on arm.
I remember years and years ago before netbooks were (briefly) popular here seeing a thing from some electronics conference in Japan where they showed off a MIPS netbook. Insane battery life, no fan because it ran so cool. Talked about MIPS and ARM as growing and soon probably taking over the world. Phones and Apple are finally giving arm some real headway, but non-Apple desktops still need a good arm option as far as I can tell. Hopefully soon?
@rnelson we are getting there on the desktop PC ARM front. There are mini PCs with the Snapdragon SoCs in them and NVIDIAs new Spark SoC is ARM based. Doesn't help my AM5 system though :(
I have one of those Windows Arm DevKits as well. I have a hacky version of Arch Linux ARM installed on it because I didn't find many other ways to run Linux on it. It doesn't work very well though, the NVMe/storage driver is super slow, which slows down the whole system.
@wezm @rnelson I understand many of the people who designed the early versions of Apple's chips went on to design Qualcomm's current good ones. Apparently with a bottomless bucket of money they learned how to build high performance ARM cores!
Qualcomm's software/driver situation is still pretty bad, but their promise for official Linux support is hopefully a harbinger of improvements!
@pmarheine @rnelson the promise of the possibilities led me to buy one of the original Snapdragon X Elite laptops in 2024. Alas Linux support for it is still pretty terrible. And Windows developed an issue where it reboots after sleeping regularly.
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@wezm went threadripper for that reason. CPU and motherboard were reasonable price considering 2x cores and bandwidth.
The RAM though, er that’s a bit expensive