Amiga X2000 launch announced; this time supplied as a complete branded and marketable machine.
Who knows, if they manage to make something truly marketable, then I might buy one myself!
Hyperion announce an OS4 ARM port, A-EON announce new ARM based hardware, the whole (old and new) Amiga community rejoice and 'Amiga' has an albeit minor comeback as a popular hobbyist platform.
I'd think this is a requirement for making something "truly marketable", but I'd doubt it would happen, since the OS4 guys seem to be very rabid PPC-for-desktop believers (probably the last ones on the entire planet).
While x86 (or "x64") would be the only option if you want the sheer power that only the Core-i7 can offer today, there are certainly happening a lot of interesting things in the "ARM's race" (
).
One argument that many people use to dismiss ARM for desktop, is the high level of integration and the fact that tablets/smart phones/smart TV's etc are the obvious target applications. However, AMD
recently announced a more "traditional" ARM CPU that differs from this:
AMD Hierofalcon- Up to eight 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores
- Up to 2GHz.
- Dual 64-bit memory channels DDR3/DDR4
- 10-gigabit Ethernet
- PCI Express 3
This one doesn't have on-chip graphics, but it sure will be a power horse, and it has 3rd gen PCI-e.
Personally, I *like* the high level of integration of the more traditional ARM CPU's. IMHO this is what makes them cheap yet powerful, and indeed very interesting to people like us. Speaking of this, I have seen a
rumor (supposedly from an
anonymous AMD executive) saying that AMD is about to introduce at least one CPU aimed for the Android/Tablet consumer market as well, thus entering competition with companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, NVIDIA for these kinds of consumer markets. This chip will also be based on the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture, and it will feature Cortex-A53 and/or Cortext-A57 cores (they can be used in a big.LITTLE configuration) as well as integrated graphics based on their own Graphics Core Next (GCN), known from the Radeon HD 7000-series.
The ARM archtecture doesn't lack interesting offerings from numerous CPU manufacturers for HW developers, that's for sure. Heck, even the current ARM CPU families (various models based on Cortex-A15 and even Cortex-A9) outperforms anything PPC-based we use today, and it's dirt cheap, low heat, low power consumption and enables extremely small footprint devices, so...
