Sounds good, but also sounds odd that a dicey internet situation caused you to move to the cloud as opposed to local (I guess could be dicey uplink for remote team or similar)

Asahi Linux might support 64k pages on Apple Silicon hardware. Might require patching some of the software though, if it's built assuming a default page size.

It should also be possible to patch Linux itself to support different page sizes in different processes/address spaces, which it currently doesn't. It would be quite fiddly (which is why it hasn't happened so far) but it should be technically feasible.

IIRC ARM64 hardware also has some special support (compared to x86 and x86-64) for handling multiple-page "blocks" - that kind of bridges the gap between a smaller and larger page size, opening up further scenarios for better support on the OS side.

OP works for Red Hat, and some of the tests require booting systems with 64k pages.

What surprises me more is why Red Hat doesn't provide them with the proper hardware..

I would guess to develop and test software that will ultimately run on a system with 64k page size.

Armv8.6-A is almost the same as Armv9.1-A, except that a few features are not mandatory.

There have been no consumer chips with Armv9.1-A, but only with Armv9.0-A and with Armv9.2-A. The only CPU with Armv8.6-A that has ever been announced publicly was the now obsolete Neoverse N2. Neoverse N2 has been skipped by Amazon and I do not know if any other major cloud vendor has used it.

So what you really search for are CPUs with Armv9.2-A (i.e. a superset of Armv8.6-A), i.e. with Cortex-A520 or Cortex-A720 or Cortex-X4 or Cortex-A725 or Cortex-X925.

There are many smartphones launched last year or this year with these CPU cores, but except for them the list of choices is short, i.e. either the very cheap Radxa Orion O6 (Cortex-A720 based), which is fine, but its software is immature, or a very expensive NVIDIA DGX development system (Cortex-X925 based; $4000 from NVIDIA or $3000 from ASUS), or one of the latest Apple computers, which support Armv8.7-A (which do not have SVE, but which have SME).

For the latest Qualcomm CPUs, I have no idea what ISA is supported by them, because Qualcomm always hides very deeply any technical information about their products.

If all you care about is the CPU, then a mid-range Android smartphone in the $400-$500 price range could be a better development system, especially if its USB Type C connector supports USB 3.0 and DisplayPort, like some Motorola Edge models, allowing you to use an external monitor and a docking station.

If you also care about testing together with some standard desktop/server peripherals, the mini-ITX motherboard of Radxa Orion O6 is more appropriate, but encountering bugs in some of its Linux device drivers is likely, which may slow down the development until they are handled.

Radxa orion o6 claims to be the first arm v9 system available.

Oracle OCI?

Their Ampere A1 free tier is pretty good. 4 core ARM and 24gb ram webserver for free.

A lot of software is built and optimized for x86 and EPYC processors are really good so it is hard to get into arm, don’t think that many companies use it.

They're slow and the arch is less compatible? Arm cores in web hosting are typically known as the shit-tier.

I think the main use case for these is some sort of Android build farm, as a CI/CD pipeline with testing of different OS versions and general app building, since they don't have to emulate arm.

I haven’t bought new hardware since I was a teenager. Second hand is cheap and good for the environment. I never received a broken part and everything has worked reliably for me.

2-3 years is not a lot. My daily driver laptop is from 2011 and still going strong.

Sure, there are “lemons” out there, but there are also a lot of people who just replace their hardware often.

The main failure points in electronics are by far power supply and batteries.

Non-polymer electrolytic capacitors can dry out, but just about all decent modern motherboards use polymer-based since years ago.

My current NAS is my previous desktop, which I bought in 2015. I tended to keep my desktop on 24/7 due to services, and my NAS as well, so it's been running more or less continuously since then. It's on its second PSU but apart from that chugging along.

I've been using older computer parts like this for a long time, and reliability increased markedly after they switched to non-polymer caps.

Modern higher-end GPUs due to their immense power requirements can have components fail, typically in the voltage regulation. Often this can be fixed relatively cheaply.

If buying a desktop I'd check that it works, it looks good inside (no dust bunnies etc), seller seems legit, and I'd throw a new PSU in there once I bought it.

My current computer is from more than 10 years ago, and I found it in a dumpster. Works fine.

Built a gaming desktop for a friend almost 2 years ago; used GPU and CPU (maybe a few others things too), everything's going great. It helps that our local Cragslist offers efficient buyer protection.

Server-side, I also bought used Xeons for an old box and recertified 10TB Exos. No issues there neither.

The HDDs are a bit of a gamble, but for anything else I can only encourage you to buy used!

I regularly buy used hardware. It fails when it fails, same as the new stuff. Is there a higher probability? Possibly, but at the small sample sizes I'm at I can't feel the difference. Feels random either way.

> I never bought used computer parts.

I was taken aback by this.

I almost never buy new parts, except phones, and not always then.

I don't think I've bought a new computer since about 2001 or 2002, and then, that was because someone else was paying and her stipulation was new only. Before then... the 1980s?

Computer hardware is like a car: when you exit the shop, 25% of the value just dissipates like a puff of steam. Within about 3 years, another 50-60% is gone. So, I always try to buy kit that's more than about 3Y old, because that's when it becomes cost-effective.

When you pay 10% of the new price, that means you are getting at least 10x the price:performance ratio. It's almost impossible to buy anything new that is 10x faster than something ~3 years old and it has been for 20-25 years or more now.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. People throwing out old but still working servers, desktops, and laptops is pretty common. Companies regularly decommission and throw out their IT assets after some number of years, even if the stuff still works (which most of it still does).

those are server-grade stuff, it's normal for them to work 10 years continuously.

Used professional hardware (servers, workstations) are made with higher quality standards so they last fairly long.

25% more cores and 36% more clock. It amounts to paying 85% more for 70% more perf. Not too bad.

He clearly refers to that and states they did not respond.

Also, CPU was hardly the biggest cost here.

Those auctions are where we looked at. No answer from seller - probably they did not wanted to deal with sending packages outside of USA.

It's not "your" HN, HN doesn't do algorithmic/per-user ranking. (Ed.: Actually a refreshing breath of wide social cohesion on a platform, IMHO. We have enough platforms that create bubbles for you.)

It's top1 on everyone's HN because a sufficient number of people (including myself) thought it a nice writeup about fat ARM systems.

I haven’t been following hardware for a while, granted, but this is the first time I see a desktop build with an arm64 cpu. Didn’t know you can just… buy one.

Normal ARM64 80 core system with $1000 EATX motherboard? How is this typical?