Wait, you're kidding, right? 90% people on this forum are technoids and you think they don't know what's powering their phones? And not just iPhone, my good old Mpx200 is also ARM based. Other than that - my NDS, PPC Loox, N800. I would still prefer a move to x86, but you can't deny ARM is used in virtually everything and is therefore far from obscurity.
3DO and Gameboy Advance as well as the cutting edge 80s desktop machine the Acorn Archimedes. Now where's my cake
Seriously, ARM is not any better than the kind of things on SAM440. It's a waste of time converting OS4 to ARM which is no small task. The Xbox 360 CPU Xenon (triple core PPC @ 3.2ghz) is a better option to tweak OS4 to run on, and that is a seriously powerful CPU butting heads with the i7 even today as a geometry setup engine.
Really? My Core 2 Quad Q9450, with 12MB of cache and running at 2.66GHz was about 200 quid when it was brand spanking new. I'd say it has proven itself to be pretty damn good value for money.
I think you misunderstood me, what I mean is if you are making a cheap AND powerful machine from CPUs currently available there isn't a single CPU that comes close to the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU that's all. If you want i7 performance using x86 you need to buy the same components as every other PC manufacturer. You can build like for like x86-64 machines as Dell or HP etc but you will never undercut them. But as OS4 is already a PPC OS then why ignore the Xenon CPU and spend years porting big endian/little endian OS/CPU?
All pie in the sky though, someone has to build a motherboard for an IBM Xenon and put some DDR3 memory and an ATI x1900 class GPU....