whoa nice to see an Asahi user

I’ve read wonders about current Macs power efficiency, my dude’s looks like nothing in comparison haha

My daily driver is a Macbook Air M2 running Asahi Linux (on the M2 ARM CPU obviously).

I've been pleasantly surprised how little ARM incompatibility I've run into. Even better, when I spin up a cloud VM for personal use I usually choose an ARM based server for cost savings. I know most binaries I compile locally on my laptop will run natively on my cloud servers.

Also once you get to M2 speeds, you can do x86 software emulation for low to mid performance applications.

It highly depends on the exact device. Super mainstream boards like the Raspberry Pi 500+ typically have great support. Most other boards don't, due to the fragmentation and lack of UEFI standardization.

A good way to check is to see if multiple mainstream distributions support the device you're trying to use on their own volition. If the only thing available is some custom forked distribution by the board vendor, that's a huge red flag.

I wouldn’t say personal use is a deal breaker. Plenty of distros like archlinuxarm and debian have pretty decent binary package repos in part thanks to raspberry pi and other prevalent arm v7 and v8 platforms. Otherwise you can compile things yourself.

Fex is also looking to be a game changer for arm - x86/x64 emulation in userspace on arm64 v8+. No need to care too much if there isn’t an arm binary available - just run the x86 one through fex.

Weeeeell, they applied scripts that somebodyleft behind to document their own hacking efforts. What this is is a kind of presentation of how they ran the scripts and issues they ran into.

Linux also saved my hardware... from an awful operating system amirite?

That's super cool though, very resourceful.

I'm glad your "shouldn't" trumps my "did it".

2010 i5/i7 (and previous, Core 2 Duo models) don't take faster RAM. so e.g. 2007/08 models won't take 800 MHz DDR2, only 667 and 2009/10 DDR3 won't take anything faster than 1067. 2011/12 can run 1333 and 1600. all later models have RAM soldered.

anyhow, those 1067 are rare and thus the mentioned trick was needed. I'll try to find the post describing the process and link it in OP. found it: https://hannuhartikainen.fi/blog/hacking-ddr3-spd/

Wow, that was pretty impressive trickery and hackery. Cool stuff!

turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such.

You shouldn't need to reprogram the ram at all. If the machine only supports up to X it should only run the ram at X speeds. And would only run slower if the timing was worse on the faster (mhz) stick.

thankfully, we got msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU’s registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT.

You also want to be careful with that. They throttle the CPU like that because power supplies can't handle the instantaneous spikes of turbo boost adequately. Particularly if you use a lower wattage charger. It's probably fine, but it might be unstable depending on the load.

I kept multiple Chromebooks going after Google stopped supporting

forgot: I have a broken subwoofer from a 2.1 system. the woofer works but one of the channels is dead. I also have a monitor with decent stereo speakers in it. enter pipewire - pactl load-module module-combine-sink creates a new audio card comprised of all other audio cards and selecting it outputs all audio to all of them. I got the stereo speakers for mid/high tones and the woofer for low ones - awesome sound for nothing!

Input-remapper has been an amazing tool for me, though its syntax is awful coming from ahk on windows.

OK, I was going to say that's kinda pricey compared to Lenovo or Dell, but the size! 12"? That's like my 15 year old Lenovo X61! Wow, nice.

That's a reasonable price for something that compact.

My current Lenovo X is nice, light, thin, but I miss having a narrower machine. Yes, I get less screen, but it feels more portable, like an actual notebook.

Sounds good. I think all laptops should be repairable like this.

Fwiw most parts of Star Labs laptops are replaceable. They don't make a thing about it but they should.

That’s what I meant.

Hopefully this sells well and the various execs pay attention.

Its not DB Schenker, subsidiary of german railways, if thats what you mean.

That Schenker?

There are some simulation and math scenarios where it can speed things up while using fraction of power a GPU would, but for general use it is not that usefull.

all machine learning is basically just matrix math.

That sounds limited to LLMs.

Review demonstrates performance and efficiency have a long way to go

https://youtu.be/OkFfTK8S00c

unless i'm misunderstanding it, an npu is a vector coprocessor without the graphics stuff

An... AI PC? As in a neural engine or something? Will it help with running LLMs? I'm not sure what that is.

Now I have to look up what an NPU is, what it does and what it's for. Completely new territory for me. I thought it was all CPUs and GPUs, maybe specialized hardware for mining crypto but NPUs?

Darn, first I see something fun and interesting, and then I read that the hardware is no longer for sale (available only to the original backers). Uh-oh.

Well, OK I guess. Maybe they'll be selling again once they start shipping.