Since Apple announced that it was transitioning to the ARM architecture, we have been expecting PCs based on ARM chips to start to surface. The ARM matra until now has been low-power and high-efficiency. The thing is, though, with Apple making a line of high-performance ARM PCs, the rest of the industry is basically getting the green-light to do the same, or the history of Apple’s innovation cycle has shown, to do one better.
The CEC Phytium FT-2000/4 is a quad-core, 64-bit ARM v8 based CPU. The chip is hardly known outside of mainland China. From what I can gather, it seems to be based on the FT-2000+/64, which is a 64 core ARM server SoC that is designed by Phytium and was introduced in 2019. That server chip is made with TSMC’s 16 nm process, and it operates at up 2.3 GHz and has a TDP of 96 W.
The PKS gaming PC includes a FT-2000/4 processor and 32GB of DDR4 system memory. It also has an unknown discrete graphics card that has 8GB of graphics memory. The PC has a Gigabit Ethernet port, six USB ports, and an HDMI port. It’s also got a DisplayPort output.
We have no idea what operating system the machine is running, but it’s certainly some flavor of Linux for ARM as Windows on ARM isn’t really out there in the wild, yet.
This new PC shows what’s coming in regards to ARM on the desktop. Things are going to start to get really interesting when we see more mainstream hardware vendors build the ARM desktop portfolio.
