Yes, this particular choice of hardware sounds strange to me too, this CPU is intended for low power servers, isn't it? There are tons of ARM system on chips in 1..5W power envelope and have built-in video, audio and USB.
Also sentences like "Hardware choices will opt for longer battery life rather than 3D graphics performance" confuse me. The chips that have high 3D performance also usually have very low power consumption. Albeit in this case it will be problematic to find any kind external graphics chip, I assume the CPU has a PCI-e bus and they will have to pick a discrete PC laptop GPU.
There's a further problem with ARM chips. Unlike x86, where there's some kind of a standard for peripherals and software (ie. the PC "standard"), all ARM SoCs have very diverse configurations. There's no standard pin layouts, no standard "chipsets", no standard BIOS or bootloaders. All IRQs are different, memory maps vary, and standards like ACPI for power management, etc do not really exist.
I really wish that there were ARM-based low power laptops with as much open source firmware/drivers/kernel as possible, but unfortunately, this project does not seem very realistic to me. I hope that future ARM-based devices will have a better ecosystem and standards for building a complete computer around the CPU without being married to the software and hardware of the particular SoC vendor.
An underpowered phone SOC with a closed GPU requiring binary blobs sure sounds like a great fit for a project whose goal is making an open laptop.
I've used multiple attempts at ARM-based laptops / two-in-ones. So far they've been all been painfully slow. If they're targeting a x220 chassis, the constraints are going to be completely different from anything a consumer ARM SOC is ever deployed on. The standard battery on that is 63Wh, and it used 35W TDP CPUs. If there's a chip that can get laptop performance rather than phone performance, it makes perfect sense to spend at least a little bit of that massive thermal and power budget on it.
Perhaps the higher power tablet chips (ie. closer to 5-10 Watts TDP) could be a nice alternative? FWIW, I have used desktop Linux on a ~2012 ARM tablet chip and it wasn't fast but still a decent experience.
I'd be more worried about finding any sort of decent graphics chip. The discrete laptop chips tend to be for gamers (ie. high power) because all Intel laptop CPUs have an integrated GPU in them anyway (for mainstream customers). And sourcing discrete GPUs in small numbers is going to be difficult. Add in a requirement for open source drivers and it's even more difficult.
Of course they're different but when it comes to area, power and performance, it's not a huge difference. It's an incremental improvement, not a quantum leap.
I don't understand this digression at all. Yes, ARM64 chips have approximately the same performance envelope as ARM chips. How is this relevant to anything in this discussion? If anything, it's an argument against tablet-level SoCs. Tablet-level SoCs have poor performance, so they want a better chip?
I don't understand the comparisons to ARM world at all. These people want to make an open (to the extent possible) ARM64 laptop. The ARM64 market is extremely scarce. There are very few chips, and even fewer are for sale. If you're not a huge player, almost nothing is for sale (yet). Those chose the available chip that has acceptable performance and requires fewest binary blobs.
Is there any ARM64 (!!!) SoC of comparable performance that requires less than of fewer blobs than this chip, and is for sale? If yes, I want to see it. If not, I don't understand the point of this discussion. Note that I mean actual SoC for sale, not some kind of board. And by available for sale I mean available in small number today, and without having to sign away your soul to buy it.
Dude it's a totally new ISA. The assembly might look similar but it's got a totally different register set, instruction set, and memory model. It's definitely a quantum leap.
Also sentences like "Hardware choices will opt for longer battery life rather than 3D graphics performance" confuse me. The chips that have high 3D performance also usually have very low power consumption. Albeit in this case it will be problematic to find any kind external graphics chip, I assume the CPU has a PCI-e bus and they will have to pick a discrete PC laptop GPU.
There's a further problem with ARM chips. Unlike x86, where there's some kind of a standard for peripherals and software (ie. the PC "standard"), all ARM SoCs have very diverse configurations. There's no standard pin layouts, no standard "chipsets", no standard BIOS or bootloaders. All IRQs are different, memory maps vary, and standards like ACPI for power management, etc do not really exist.
I really wish that there were ARM-based low power laptops with as much open source firmware/drivers/kernel as possible, but unfortunately, this project does not seem very realistic to me. I hope that future ARM-based devices will have a better ecosystem and standards for building a complete computer around the CPU without being married to the software and hardware of the particular SoC vendor.
disclosure: I work for an ARM SoC manufacturer