ARM based Amiga?

[billt]

If Hyperion ever choose to go to different processor that PowerPC, I think ARM would be a great choice. There's already laptops running on ARMs. Nearly all the tablets do. I'm not aware of an ARM desktop, but desktops are falling out of favor these days, and no one says you can't make one the way Acube makes PowerPC desktops, when PPC is no longer a desktop platform. There's a lot going on in the ARM world these days, performance is going up, and I think it'd make a great architecture for AmigaOS.

[billt]

Some people think Amiga is a CPU or Amiga is some special "custom" chips, or whatever. To me, Amiga is the user experience. What the GUI looks like, and more important how I interact with it. It multitasks. I find it agreeable to use rather than an awkward thing to fight into submission.

For those that demand a 68k, you're frozen in time. So are the "custom chips" zealots.

While new PowerPCs still come into being, such as Freescale's exciting new AMP series, PPC zealots are also in an awkward position due to the difficulty in getting them in a form that a) runs AmigaOS and b) we desire. (ie a laptop in my case)

And while ARM doesn't seem to come in a desktop board (that I'm aware of anyway, perhaps I'm just ignorant), we could have them with similar difficulty/expense as we get our PPCs in. But ARMs are already in netbooks! And they already dominate tablets, for anyone who wishes for a REAL Amiga tablet. Not one of those phony things that are Amiga in nothing more than the sticker on the case, however "legal" those stickers may be.

[billt]

@Number 6: That's very interesting.  I wonder which part needs the funding?  Even drivers for existing PPC solutions and Mac computers seem to be quite a stretch, I can't imagine how a CPU change would ever take place.  It's almost like they want someone else to make money for them.

Even then I think my other points still apply, especially the point of further dividing the community.

Think of it this way. Anyone wishing to make an AmigaOS4.x driver needs to buy something that runs 4.x. Then the widget he wants to write a driver for. Financially, for that individual, buying the 4.x prerequisite hardware may be more of a challenge than buying a commodity x86 PC. Heck, it may be a financial impossibility for that particular individual. And thus that particular driver doesn't get made. However, if this individual could afford a commodity hardware base and then run OS4.x on it, then we'd have gotten that driver.

OK, one might argue that someone able to make such a driver for AmigaOS is likely to find a way to afford the base hardware, or is more likely to be able to afford it to start with. Possibly. But then you still have what the guy desires vs what is available. Can he have a laptop, or must he succumb to being tethered to a desk in a room somewhere where he doesn't want to be, or cannot be for enough time to be useful? Being able to afford something can still leave someone without that something.

[billt]

Heck, even Arduino has now gone Arm
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/19/1835250/Arduino-Goes-ARM