Developer Marcin Juszkiewicz concluded his eleven-month AArch64 desktop experiment, abandoning the Ampere Altra system for his previous x86-64 machine. The 80-core workstation required constant custom kernel builds to address PCIe erratum issues, making it impractical for daily use despite impressive specifications.

The PCIe65 erratum in Ampere Altra chips caused data corruption with AMD GPUs, forcing Juszkiewicz to maintain a patched kernel repository. He rebuilt the kernel weekly with custom versioning like '7.0.2-200.fc44.pcie65.6' to keep hardware functioning, often running newer kernels than official Fedora releases.

When AMD Radeon RX6700 XT support broke around Linux 7.0, constant fence timeout errors made video playback unusable. Switching to Nvidia RTX 2060 seemed promising until Flatpak compatibility issues with Orca Slicer and FreeCAD surfaced, as NVIDIA's GL platform extensions weren't available for AArch64.

Returning to his 6-core Ryzen system restored full functionality for 3D printing workflows and Steam gaming. The ARM desktop experiment revealed that raw core count doesn't translate to desktop usability when fundamental hardware compatibility requires ongoing kernel maintenance.