cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/330591

This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster.

I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we’ll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro.

As of today, I have this thing running 128 CPU cores at 2.8 GHz. I upgraded the RAM to 384 GB of DDR4 3200 ECC RAM, specifically six Samsung 64 GB sticks. I installed an Nvidia 4070 Ti.

It’s running both Ubuntu 22.04 Server and Windows 11 for Arm now. I even got Steam installed on Ubuntu, after so many commenters kindly pointed out Box86 and Box64 exist!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    11 months ago

    Apple locks down their software pretty tightly, I don’t know if you can make an ARM Hackintosh. If you got macOS to work, you would lose out on x64 acceleration (because the proprietary semi-x86 memory management isn’t built into Amperes) and you wouldn’t be able to use features like their video acceleration engine or their machine learning engine.

    You’d need to get a GPU with drivers for ARM macOS. That’s going to be a challenge, because even the Mac Pro with its PCIe slots can’t drive the AMD video cards that used to work on x64 macOS. You’re never ever getting anything made by Nvidia to work on there, and I don’t think Intel or AMD provide macOS drivers for ARM. Perhaps you could cobble together your own driver from the open source Linux drivers, but I wouldn’t count on it.

    You could try virtualisation. macOS runs legally inside virtual machines on ARM, so if you run an ARM VM you should be able to get GPU output out of that, and maybe forward it to the GPU from Linux. That should also fix networking and other such components. Your macOS would probably be dog slow, though, because it kind of needs GPU acceleration for any kind of comfortable user interaction.

    That’s the big problem with macOS, really, nobody writes drivers for their integrated hardware for that platform since Apple is the only one who can legally build systems that have those components in the first place. Back in the x64 days, you could use Intel drivers because Apple used Intel hardware for macOS, Broadcom drivers because they used Broadcom for their WiFi, and AMD drivers because Mac Pros were supposed to work with AMD GPUs. Even different models would work quite well because most hardware revisions aren’t all that different from each other from a software point of view, at least within the same generation.

    It’s a start, but honestly, I expect the Hackintosh scene to die out the moment they stop releasing x64 versions of macOS.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        11 months ago

        They reversed the M1 GPU driver to an impressive amount, but Hackintoshes won’t have Apple GPUs. In fact, I don’t think the server CPUs this article is referring to even come with any hardware acceleration at all, they’re server CPUs and servers generally use dedicated GPU cards for any real workload.

        To use these, you’ll need to plug in a GPU. Without drivers there should be some kind of fallback driver, but it’s slow and unusable. To use such a plug-in GPU, you’ll need manufacturer (or open source) drivers for macOS.

      • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        That’s a driver for Apple hardware running in a non-Apple OS. That’s different from tricking an Apple OS into running non-Apple hardware.