Post B6qo8P67CW2qeUgFLU by datenwolf@chaos.social
(DIR) More posts by datenwolf@chaos.social
(DIR) Post #B6qlpaRCcAQWPdRYKe by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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Is anybody using, or considering using, ngscopeclient on an ARM64 platform?Would Debian aarch64 be a platform worth adding to CI and officially supporting? I think I can probably run it as a VM on the mac mini.But I'm not sure what's out there that actually has the GPU horsepower to perform well. Like, I think somebody tried to build it on a raspberry pi and it *worked* but I'm not sure how useful it would be on something so limited.
(DIR) Post #B6qmUfaqLqWOH6XiTI by jpm@aus.social
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@azonenberg some of the RK3588 SBCs don’t suck for performance. Not sure how good their GPU performance is, but in theory some of the bigger ones can run a normal* discrete GPU. * I tried a Radeon R9 290 on a RockPro64 once but melted the 12V wire supplying the power to the SBC
(DIR) Post #B6qn2DAsWBeRyuOLmC by suihkulokki@society.oftrolls.com
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@azonenberg There is the Nvidia DGX spark with more than enough GPU oomph.
(DIR) Post #B6qn6fqZr9084A1Y5g by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@jpm Well I'm not asking if one could theoretically run it on an aarch64 platform. I already know it can be done. If there's any bugs, they're probably minimal - the combination of Debian amd64 and MacOS aarch64 working implies that there's not a whole lot of disjoint code where Debian aarch64 would break.I'm asking if enough people intend to do so, or are already building unsupported from source, for us to put in the legwork to officially test and support.
(DIR) Post #B6qnPVz8kLr6yx0sb2 by datenwolf@chaos.social
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@azonenberg RPi-5 has a PCIe interface. You can connect and use GPUs supported by the in-tree Linux kernel drivers on it.
(DIR) Post #B6qnSAAUJmNYBdaG3M by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@suihkulokki Again though... are there actual or prospective users who have one? Those things are not cheap IIRC.It's got massive mellanox NIC, so it would likely work great for high performance streaming data, but I have no idea if enough people care for us to put in the effort to support it officially.
(DIR) Post #B6qnbUTy9xOpnR8yfI by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@datenwolf But how many users would do that rather than just the laptop/desktop they almost certainly have as well?There's a ton of possible frankenstein setups but I am interested in platforms actual users might have and be using for real work as a primary engineering PC.So like, asahi on a M1 machine for example (what's the status of Vulkan there?)Are there any other decently performance and popular arm laptops/desktops that are at all widespread?
(DIR) Post #B6qnfGFszvAmpWM2CW by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@datenwolf also ngscopeclient eats RAM for breakfast and the pi's don't have very much so you would be limited to pretty shallow memory.But I guess not all of our users are necessaryly crunching tens of megapoints with complex filter graphs all the time
(DIR) Post #B6qnkjlqgfAToouqaO by jpm@aus.social
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@azonenberg … and now I have a horrific idea of bolting a PCIe ThunderScope to one of those ARM SBCs with a touchscreen and a battery and turn it into a high-end portable ‘scope
(DIR) Post #B6qntzX9RyTLJSSDMu by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@suihkulokki also apparently it only has 273 GB/s of RAM bandwidth if I am reading specs right, compared to e.g. 616 for my semi-retired RTX 2080 Ti.It may have a lot of NPU performance but ngscopeclient is heavy on the memory interface so honestly I don't think the spark would perform super great vs even an older dGPU. Although the 128GB of unified memory is nice.
(DIR) Post #B6qnxYAn7Ottc6gyhM by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@jpm It's been brought up as a possibility and I see no technical reason why it wouldn't work assuming the PCIe interface was compatible and you didn't have issues with too small a BAR region or whatever quirks embedded PCIe sometimes has
(DIR) Post #B6qo0ae2Nw089FozNw by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@jpm but you would need to build a new GUI because ngscopeclient is not at all touch friendly, one of the reasons it looks so different from mainstream scope interfaces is it's a mouse/keyboard first UI without big chonky touch buttons
(DIR) Post #B6qo59X4cDaHVbjvJw by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@jpm there has been discussion of making a touch-friendly GUI around libscopehal/libscopeprotocols, but it would likely be targeting iPad if it were ever created
(DIR) Post #B6qo8P67CW2qeUgFLU by datenwolf@chaos.social
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@azonenberg Hmm… I think the RAM argument is much stronger than the architecture one. Short of going with some server class ARM system, most ARM platforms are within the same order of magnitude of available RAM (including most Macs, excl. the discontinued Mac Pro)
(DIR) Post #B6qoERaAsKJW61cX7g by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@datenwolf I know somebody with a 128GB RAM macbook pro and that would probably smoke most other platforms for ngscopeclient stuff.Certainly it's gonna beat most desktops in WFM/s per watt even if a big xeon + nvidia beast will win on absolute performance
(DIR) Post #B6qoGCfFJO8WPJpcf2 by suihkulokki@society.oftrolls.com
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@azonenberg You are probably right, the intersection on SPARK owners and ngoscopeclient users is probably about zero. The current spark users are all working on spicy autocomplete, gotta wait until the bubble burts until others can get their hands on it.
(DIR) Post #B6qooimgOfdTs5lmMK by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@suihkulokki if you want to use a slop-targeted product for ngscopeclient, you'd be far better off with one of the desktop "AI edition" GPUs that have extra VRAM (as long as it's not some kind of "AI only" GPU with crippled float performance, like the mining cards from years back)Like the R9700 AI Pro in my office workstation which has 32GB of 256-bit GDDR6 and 644 GB/s of bandwidth - only slightly faster than the previous 2080 Ti, but almost triple the capacity.And of course having 64 + 8 MB of L3/L2 cache vs 5.5 of L2 is a nice boost, as is the 47 vs 13 tflops of float32 performance.It's a great end user card for ngscopeclient but the dev UX sucks because AMD's shader profiler is trash compared to nvidia's
(DIR) Post #B6qpwDDZk8syF1U5NQ by funkylab@mastodon.social
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@azonenberg @datenwolf yeah and Apple M-series has good RAM bandwidths. An RPi, is judging from the single channel and CPU speeds, probably very lucky if what it can cumulatively do between memory and CPU is 10 GB/s, which would be around a factor of 6 less than the old-ish apple M1, and 25 times less than the M4 Pro. Also, how on earth would you get any data into a set-top box SoC like the one in the RPi5? it's maximum peripheral bandwidth is limited by, soldering included, two separate PCIe2x1
(DIR) Post #B6qqOcqS3XL1pYDUxc by gsuberland@chaos.social
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@azonenberg if I was going to, it'd be on macOS / M4 Max.
(DIR) Post #B6qqTWQPLx8ZMoMzZY by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@gsuberland sorry i should say arm64 Linux. aarch64 macos is already fully supported
(DIR) Post #B6qruJ0tQOhbXplqaW by f4grx@chaos.social
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@azonenberg well, the pi 5 has pcie...
(DIR) Post #B6qu0JZITTKiuZr8Do by datenwolf@chaos.social
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@azonenberg hence why I excluded the "… Pro" models from that statement.
(DIR) Post #B6r6kshBP4UqcxW208 by penguin42@mastodon.org.uk
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@azonenberg Hmm I've got a Asus Qualcomm Snapdragon X based laptop; 16GB of RAM and NVMe disc and reasonable GPU; I an give it a go. It's currently running debian/sid. There are some (Lenovo?) with 64GB RAM on.
(DIR) Post #B6rV5OJbwuLHNznqCW by penguin42@mastodon.org.uk
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@azonenberg Builds cleanly on debian for me, seems to be running happy:(Why do you list xzip as a dependency - it's an infocom interpreter!)
(DIR) Post #B6rV5OVJFPhRyHHBR2 by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@penguin42 hmm is that perhaps a typo for xz? i would have to look
(DIR) Post #B6rVucoForyf6kZ9u4 by penguin42@mastodon.org.uk
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@azonenberg The debian xz compression utilities is xz-utils.
(DIR) Post #B6rVxpVL4o5bLiFMY4 by azonenberg@ioc.exchange
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@penguin42 file a ticket and we'll see if that is in fact the intent. i'm not actually sure what we use xz for internally at all.
(DIR) Post #B6rWI8KulmpJXy3Jaq by penguin42@mastodon.org.uk
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@azonenberg Done; https://github.com/ngscopeclient/scopehal-docs/issues/120