Do you think it will be possible to run GNU/Linux operating systems on Microsoft’s brand new “Copilot+ PCs”? The latter ones were unveiled just yesterday, and honestly, the sales pitch is quite impressive! A Verge article on them: Link

  • h3ndrik@feddit.de
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    3 months ago

    Wow. That settles the discussion pretty quickly…

    I’m not sure with the transition layer… Isn’t there things like qemu and box64… And multiarch support is part of most of the Linux distributions as of today? I always thought it’s just a few commands to make your system execute foreign binaries. I mean I’ve only ever tried cross-compiling for arm and running 32bit games on amd64 architecture so I don’t know that much. In the end I don’t use that much proprietary software, so it’s not really any issue for me. >99% of Linux software I use is available for ARM. But I can see how that’d be an issue for a gamer, regardless of the operating system being Windows or Linux or MacOS.

    And I’m not really interested in the AI coprocessor itself. The real question for me is: Can it do LLM inference as fast as a M2/M3 Macbook? For that it’d need RAM that’s connected via a wide bus. And then there’s the question what does a machine with 64GB of RAM cost. That’s the major drawback with a Macbook because they get super expensive if you want a decent amount of RAM.

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Isn’t there things like qemu and box64…

      Yeah, but they’re experimental and probably very buggy. I’ve used box64 on my phone, it doesn’t play well with everything.

      Can it do LLM inference as fast as a M2/M3 Macbook?

      It should be better at AI stuff than M series laptops, allegedly. Many manufacturers actually started listing their prices for the new laptops, the new Microsoft ones start at 16GB of RAM at $1000. I know the Lenovo one can reach 64GB of RAM but not sure about the pricing.

      • h3ndrik@feddit.de
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        3 months ago

        Hmmh. I can’t really make an informed statement. I can’t fathom qemu being experimental. That’s like a 20 year old project and used by lots of people. I’m not sure. And I’ve yet to try Box64.

        I looked it up. The Snapdragin X Elite “Supports up to 64GB LPDDR5, with 136 GB/s memory bandwidth” while the Apple M2/M3 have anywhere from 100 GB/s memory bandwith to 150/300 or 400. (800 in the Ultra). And a graphics card has like ~300 to ~1000GB/s)

        (Of course that’s only relevant for running large language models.)