It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole. Your operating system is barely concerned about the instruction set, and much more concerned about the buses and so on that are available, and how to drive them.
You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
> You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
You get standardization on servers because of UEFI and ACPI. There are some ARM boards out there with UEFI, but for whatever reason it hasn't generally caught on in the ARM world like it has for x86.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
> It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole.
Many people are only casually interested in something, so they learn less quickly. Or they are just learning for the first time. It's not actually particularly incredible that there are people who don't know this.
ChuckMcM · 1h ago
The author appears to be nostalgic for the wintel monopoly that made it possible to write software for one system standard "PC" and have it run on dozens of different manufacturer's hardware. The people who use ARM chips typically write their own code because they aren't building general purpose computers, they are building an appliance of some sort, whether its a phone or an access point or a disk controller.
freedomben · 1h ago
I don't disagree at all with you, but it does pain me a little bit to see a phone referred to as an appliance. Phones nowadays are plenty capable general purpose computers if they aren't intentionally handicapped by the manufacturers, and the manufacturers certainly do think of them as appliances and treat them as such, but I wish that collectively we would reject that and insist on not artificially hobbling their capabilities
murphyslaw · 1h ago
The author is specifically talking about Raspberry Pi upstreaming changes. Isn't that about as close as you will get to a general purpose SoC?
fidotron · 1h ago
Right, and to emphasise the point there are x86 machines which are not architecturally PCs, such as the original XBox and Playstations 4 and 5.
kelnos · 1h ago
> Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and very explicitly does not support a key Debian feature: you can’t upgrade from one Raspberry Pi OS release to the next, so it’s a complete reinstall every 2 years instead of just an upgrade.
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.
You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
You get standardization on servers because of UEFI and ACPI. There are some ARM boards out there with UEFI, but for whatever reason it hasn't generally caught on in the ARM world like it has for x86.
Many people are only casually interested in something, so they learn less quickly. Or they are just learning for the first time. It's not actually particularly incredible that there are people who don't know this.
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.