ARM architecture

[8x13b]

Here is a desync report

[XRovertoX]

Would an ARM build be a possibility now? Given that Factorio can run on the Switch, would it be fairly trivial for the devs to made an ARM build for Linux available?

Just for the sake of context. I'm very interested in running a Clusterio server on my RPi4 K8s cluster.

[8x13b]

Fair point, since they already have an ARM build, it would be very trivial to port it to ARM Linux.

[Loewchen]

Now that the game runs on ARM even with support for cross platform play, will there be a general ARM release (15011)?

There's no plans for more releases on ARM as I don't think there's that much demand, but it's something that is now more likely to come in the future as it becomes more popular. Just because the game compiles on one ARM platform, it doesn't mean it will just work on all of them. Adding a new platform comes with a lot of work, such as creating a possibly complex build script, setting up a build server, setting up a test server, setting up distribution(website, steam, more?) and dealing with maintaining everything for the whole time(e.g. updating the build script when we change to a newer C++ standard, fixing any compilation issues that arise because of different compilers). On top of that, is we are talking about Mac, add the whole notarization, signing and whatever else they need and change all the time. There needs to be someone dedicated to making it happen and maintaining it.

[XRovertoX]

Now that the game runs on ARM even with support for cross platform play, will there be a general ARM release (15011)?

There's no plans for more releases on ARM as I don't think there's that much demand, but it's something that is now more likely to come in the future as it becomes more popular. Just because the game compiles on one ARM platform, it doesn't mean it will just work on all of them. Adding a new platform comes with a lot of work, such as creating a possibly complex build script, setting up a build server, setting up a test server, setting up distribution(website, steam, more?) and dealing with maintaining everything for the whole time(e.g. updating the build script when we change to a newer C++ standard, fixing any compilation issues that arise because of different compilers). On top of that, is we are talking about Mac, add the whole notarization, signing and whatever else they need and change all the time. There needs to be someone dedicated to making it happen and maintaining it.

Noted, thanks for the reference to that topic

[naikrovek]

Raspberry Pis have horrible memory bandwidth, even on 64-bit RasPi hardware the memory bus to the CPU is only 32-bits. No matter what the CPU specs are, the memory bandwidth on a Pi is what's going to choke it more than anything else.

Is that a problem for Factorio? No idea. I'm not going to pretend to know, either.

I'd be happy with a native build of Factorio for Apple Silicon. These have excellent performance and excellent memory bandwidth, especially on the higher-end models.

The NVidia Jetson boards are solid desktops, as well, and they deserve native builds when feasible.

[Eketek]

The infrastructure needed to support releases on ARM would also be useful for managing micro-architecture builds (compiler option "-march=<whatever>"), which supposedly should improve performance on many systems.