ARM vs. PPC (why continue the PPC path?)

[Mrs Beanbag]

Arm already dominates the mobile phone/tablet markets, it's coming to servers and the desktop next.  Freescale's iMX series is ARM successor to 68k, why not?

Some people won't call it Amiga.  I don't care what it's called, I just want a reasonable performance desktop PC that doesn't have all that crappy Intel x86 legacy inside it.

ARM makes sense.  x86's days are numbered.  PPC is as good as dead already.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Unless you're writing an OS, or programming in assembler, you'll never have to see "all that crappy Intel x86 legacy inside it".

I saw it when I put it in the socket.  I KNOW it's there, that's frustrating enough.

ARM makes sense in situations where power saving is more important than performance. x86 will be around for a long, long time still. IBM, Freescale, and AppliedMicro would disagree with you about PPC.

In other words it makes sense in my PC.  I build this system with quietness in mind first and foremost.  45W still seems like quite a lot though.

[Mrs Beanbag]

When I want a new Amiga system, I dont care what CPU it has, I want it CHEAP and FAST!

Amiga was never about having the fastest CPU.  Amiga was a media PC and it had the advantage because of its custom chipset.  The Blitter was a proto-GPU.  Xbox 360 gets by on a 3-core PPC chip (I wonder if AROS could be made to run on it?) and is perfectly affordable.

Performance-wise I'd like an Amiga that could play media and browse the internet without sweating, maybe play some games, maybe a bit of graphic design and compose some music... it was a computer you could use to do anything, let your creativity out.  It was never a workhorse.  I still occasionally use my A1200 for these sorts of things even today.

If you want a blazing fast CPU, get a PC, they've already got that market covered.  Amiga needs to fill a niche to succeed.  The niche exists.  There were people installing Linux on Playstation 3 until Sony stopped them, for some reason.

The niche is not tablets, either.  The Amiga niche is a computer that goes under your TV and doesn't need to boot the full OS to play a DVD.

At least, that's the way I see it.

[Mrs Beanbag]

They already have something like that. It's called a DVD player.

Very good.  But it would be better to say that it's called an Xbox.  The difference is an Xbox doesn't come with a "productivity" OS and a keyboard.

Most of Xbox 360's heavy compute work is done on AMD Xenos GpGPU i.e. 48 SIMD math processor array.

Exactly!  That's its "blitter".