ARM based Amiga?

[Turambar]

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.

I think a http://pandaboard.org/ would make a perfectly capable desktop machine for most everyday tasks.

[Turambar]

I think this is a much better working-out-of-the-box option than the pandaboard, and while perhaps a bit underpowered (about on par with/slightly faster than a Sam440) to be called "desktop", this doesn't stop me and many others from using it as such for everyday usage! And I certainly wouldn't mind this turn into this!

And these devices is soon to be upgraded to the i.MX53 CPU, still Cortex-A8, but much faster and more capable in many ways, and they are doing it *really* cheap (which translates into *less* than $49 for the board, no idea by how much less, but probably considerably less; low cost seems to be the main focus of the development).

When it comes to Cortex-A9 (that we see in various products today, like iPad2, Tegra2 based devices etc), current chips performs on par with the PPC G4 processors, which is not bad at all, given the additional power and benefits of the on-chip support controllers and accelerators that boosts performance of many applications in a smart, resource friendly way. A lot of things will happen in this field soon though, both in clock speed (Tegra3 will be a faster dual core Cortex-A9, have better GPU, etc, and GlobalFoundries will demonstrate a 3GHz dual core Cortex-A9 made with their 28-nm processes sometime in 2012, as well as a low-power 2GHz version), and in number of cores (Freescale recently announced their Quad Core Cortex-A9 based i.MX6, and also showed it off running in real silicon, here it's being benchmarked by Konstantinos Margaritis/Genesi. It may get here sooner than many would expect).

Cortex-A15 brings a whole bunch of new features from the desktop/server world, and a whole new level of performance.

Then we have the partnership between ARM and nVidia, bringing real 64-bit Workstation performance, the "x86 killer", while keeping the ISA backwards compatible. I think others will follow.

ARM will be the only CPU architecture running on *everything* from phones to workstation/servers, with many interesting devices in between.

Thanks for letting me know about these. I'll certainly be interested when the upgraded version becomes available.