Take the standard Apple gripes. RAM and storage are insanely priced. You can’t upgrade after the fact. Etc.
If I wanted a screaming-fast ARM desktop with a dozen or so cores, that took commodity RAM and SSD and was upgradeable later, that also ran a viable desktop operating system (for the sake of discussion let’s limit this to Windows or a mainstream Linux such as Ubuntu), what options exist out there?
It seems that you would want to be looking at systems which use the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip (or its plus or elite variants). The Verge did a comprehensive comparison back in July, but that article focuses on Laptops, not desktops. Still, it breaks down the stats and performance of the processor and GPU compared to Apple, Intel and AMD chips, which is a start.
Searching for that chip and “desktop” returns a bunch of results for a Snapdragon Dev Kit which was “coming soon.” However, that project seems to have been canceled. I’m not aware of any ARM desktops on the market at this time.
I’m not aware of an ARM alternative either. I think your best bet could be an Ampere dev kit, or Chinese parts (importing a Huawei ARM chip, for example.) The situation should be different a year from now.
If I were wanting to build a low power PC in 2024, I’d probably spec a Ryzen 5 build on pcpartspicker. It needs a fan, but its idle wattage isn’t far from Apple Silicon’s.
Well, if you can put up with an order of magnitude more cores there’s this:
That is awesome! Nice find.
Wow what a machine! Hadn’t heard about that. That seems like it could be a first step into ARM for System 76. Looking forward to their future products which would better meet my minimal needs.
+1 for System 76, have used them in the past (not ARM), no issues.
As a tangent though, I have been working my way through the Asahi Linux
builds on a Walmart 8G M1 Air. Asahi Linux
@csf111, Are you just playing with the Asahi for the heck of it? Or do you have a particular use case in mind?
I don’t want to build a low power PC. I’m wondering what’s out there that would use non-x86 tech and be user-upgradeable. It seems to me like ARM is a logical transition, but it’s happening very, very slowly.
Sorry for assuming. Why would you want Arm on desktop (as opposed to laptop) right now? I agree the transition is slow (and is not really transforming, just adding an option.)
It seems like it should be a good balance of price and performance (if it were available 
), as well as being more futureproof.
No nothing specific wrt Asahi. Simply helping on (I think) a very worthwhile project
System75 Thelio Astra arm desktop, 64,96,128 core Ampere processor, up to 512GB memory, NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU.
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It is the Threadripper class arm desktop you always wanted. Now how to hackintosh it?
You may need an X86 computer, depending on how “screaming fast” you need. 
World’s most powerful desktop PC has 256 EPYC Genoa cores, 6TB (yes TB) RAM
Welcome Joe
