A Red Hat build engineer has ended his second experimental effort at using a high-end Arm64 desktop computer as his daily driver. His conclusions are instructive.Marcin Juszkiewicz’s series of posts on his tech blog about running a Fedora-powered beast of an Arm desktop computer has been interesting reading for about a year now. Almost exactly a year ago, he built a beast of an Arm workstation. He spent some €1,800 building a machine around an Ampere Altra, which as The Register described in 2020 is a serious bit of kit. And even at €1,800 (£1550, or $2000) quite a bit of it was second-hand, including the CPU and RAM. He described the machine’s capabilities in Arm desktop: 2025 attempt, part one.We were considering a story about the sheer cost of the kit, but his latest update describes The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment. That means it’s now more of a post mortem. To cut to the chase, he has switched back to using his AMD Ryzen 5 3600 system: the six cores of a $199 chip from 2019 outperforms an 80-core Arm64 powerhouse.
Juszkiewicz, who also goes by the rather easier to spell hrw, knows his stuff, and he is a man of strong opinions. Indeed, his Mastodon profile gives a clue:
