Ideas: The new Amiga. Yes, it's inevitable!

[SamuraiCrow]

dammy wrote:

I would strongly argue there. ARM is not the only real answer, even among portable makers. The Intel Atom, VIA Nano both make solid x86-capable portable CPU's which are making inroads. New MIPS CPU's are arriving that put the ARM in for a run for it's money. Even the ancient 68k with ColdFire is starting to bring some excitement back to the field. ARM might be 60% of the market, but that is not the "only real answer" any more than m68k was in the mid 1980's, where it was in the top half and Intel was the underdog.

Last I saw, ARM was closer to 70%, but even at 60% it makes it a no brainer to port to ARM ATPIT.  If MIPS or any other CPU gets 40% or better of the portable market, I'll be happy to see a port to that as well.  Right now, it would be rather stupid to place any significant developer time on anything other then ARM. No one can  afford another PPC like fiasco.

Since nobody can afford another PowerPC-like fiasco then maybe we should be porting to a bitcode that compiles at install time like LLVM.  That's what Apple is doing.  In fact Apple is including LLVM in its 3.1 XCode presumably so it won't ever get stuck on one processor again.  (The fact that they're doing this now that they are on Intel's chips also seems to have escaped you.)  This way they can have Intel chips and PowerPC chips on the desktop and ARM chips on the handhelds without having to widen their universal "fat" binaries to produce all kinds of code simultaneously at compile time.

[SamuraiCrow]

Regarding the PS3:

It has only 256 megs of RAM and so Linux doesn't run well on it.  MacOSX and Windows aren't even available for it either.

I have a friend named Joel with a PS3 and he's sick of running Linux distros that are designed for lightweight hardware just because of the memory footprint.  He'd like to see AROS or something small running on it so that the apps will run smoothly without constantly swapping to the hard drive.