We have already told you many times in the past that when a manufacturer launches a new technology, it often does so for a business or even industrial environment. However, it often doesn’t take long for this to move to the consumer market afterwards, or to put it another way, if Gigabyte has now launched this ARM motherboard for servers, there is every chance that we will see a similar product but geared towards PCs. desktop that we all have at home.
What’s so special about this Gigabyte ARM motherboard?
Obviously, being a motherboard designed for high workloads, they have some features that are not common in hardware devices that we are more used to seeing because they are oriented to the home PC segment, such as support for several sockets and a large number of PCIe/CCIX lanes to provide the platform with high scalability.
As you can see in the diagram above on this motherboard, it incorporates 16 sockets for 8-channel DDR4 RAM, something that is not common in a home PC, where we are used to having only 4 dual-channel memory sockets or, at most 8 quad channel sockets on HEDT platforms. The board also features multiple PCI-Express 4.0 and M.2 sockets, as well as multiple SATA ports and overall extensive connectivity, which also includes two 10Gb/s RJ-45 connectors.
We repeat once again that it is clear that we are not going to see a board with these characteristics aimed at the consumer market, not even in workstations, but it is interesting because it can be the prelude to the first desktop PCs based on ARM, as Apple did relatively recently.
Will we ever see ARM-based home PCs?
The answer to this question is that, literally speaking, we already have them. As you probably already know, Apple made the decision a long time ago to put aside Intel to manufacture its own ARM processors, creating a new ecosystem that has allowed those of Cupertino precisely what we propose, to have a home PC based on ARM. However, at the end of the day we are talking about Mac computers, and it is not the conception that most users have of what a home PC is.
All in all, it seems that in recent times a clear trend towards the ARM architecture is beginning to be seen in the industry, and although the x86-x64 architecture to which we have been accustomed for years continues to be the predominant one, it would not be at all unusual start to see some ARM-based PCs.
However, it must be taken into account that it would not be an easy transition, since it is not only a matter of launching a PC with ARM hardware and that’s it, but also that software manufacturers will have to adapt their products to the new architecture, since the sets The instructions are different and, in short, they won’t work on ARM unless they redesign their programs again.
We’ll see what happens in the end, but answering this question we believe that it is possible that in a short time we will begin to see home PCs based on ARM, much more efficient and possibly cheaper than what we have today. Time will tell.
