"bet on something" is for private people making bets on horse races, on business you "do not bet" but make predictions and try to leave open chances to turn direction if prediction fails. We all know of the bets that were lost, from Commodore starting up to what we are discussing now. So if changing direction it would make more sense to have something portable like Aros so you can support both X86 and ARM and are on the safe side.
Uhh the entire industry of computing is based on speculation - you can carry out years of market research in advance of a product release, but you seriously can't anticipate the impact of said product, or its reception. In the case of Android, which PRIMARILY runs on ARM devices, with x86 and MIPS making up the minority, it has been well-received. An Android desktop would likely be ARM based, as the hardware is cheap enough that it will still be powerful, but competitive. Intel/AMD x86 at the same price range as ARM either is too power-hungry or too anemic to even boot up. That being said, I'd trust the engineers of MS, Dell and AMD, all of which I have worked with in my past job as a data center tech, over a handful of users and developers in the middle of a forum known for sociopathic trolls, hell I had lunch with a manager for the largest AMD data centre in the DC area simply because he was called out to the MS data centre I worked at and invited me and the rest of the crew to lunch at a sushi bar and discussed what he wanted to see done to improve AMD-based Dell server reliability with us, over sushi and beer at that. He also talked to me about the Opteron-A series, and he said that it will, in his own words "Be the smartest move that HQ has made since launching the Opteron line"
You know as well as I do there are logistical and also other concerns with having to support two different architectures, diametrically opposed at that! Without a ports type system like FreeBSD uses, one or the other will simply have little software. Best to focus on one architecture for logistical reasons.
Show me an ARM that competes well with an i7. AmigaOS is not some tablet OS. If a switch away from where it is now is justified then with a significant increase of computing power. Sure, an Atom is rather crappy, but who speaks about that stuff? i5 or i7 is whats' in remotely normal computers these days. And to that level ARM scales up rather poorely.
If you're going to make a brash statement, prepare something better than just an opinion:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-k1-processor.htmlThis, my friend is a SoC which has the power of an Nvidia GPU and a quad-core ARM CPU. I can't find any benchmarks vs an i5 or i7, but most people I know are on the budgetary end of computers, either older gen i-series, older-gen AMDs, or the Pentium and Celeron series of CPUs. Your personal desktop is certainly *NOT* representative of what everyone else has. ARM has scaled up at a logarithmic rate that is even better than x86, I can't really explain it to you other than it simply doesn't waste any space on the die for any legacy-cruft that an x86 CPU does. Your desktop, my workstation and most other x86 devices start up in a 16-bit mode, and have to be initialised from there to protected and then long mode just to even boot a modern, 64-bit OS. ARM? It originally deployed with a 32-bit design and a 26-bit address space, but it can still run a 32-bit binary inside the 26-bit address space. x86 doesn't have this luxury, its address mode is locked to its execution mode.
Furthermore, I will use the same argument that Howard Roark made in Fountainhead, original text below:
"The famous flutings on the famous columns — what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood — when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?
Similarly, what is real mode, AKA 16-bit mode, in a modern x86_64 CPU for? To start the BIOS, mostly - the original BIOS comes from the original IBM-PC designs, based on the 8088 and 8086. This was reimplemented by competitors to become PC-compatible. Then the 386 and 486 added a 32-bit protected mode, using an undocumented opcode in the original 8086 design to initialise it. They retained the 16-bit mode to keep DOS running, they simply used extenders like DOS4GW. With the extinction of Windows 9x with the atrocious Windows ME in late 1999, the 16-bit real mode was effectively rendered obsolete. But this was kept and copied into the 64-bit world, where now you had to escalate to long mode from protected mode from real mode. And this is all because the industry decided to use an architecture which is an extension of a 16-bit reimplementation of an 8-bit copy of a 4-bit processor. Why the hell keep all this cruft? DOS won't even run properly on a modern GPT sliced disk, let alone a system with no drivers!
ARM is significantly more towards my ideal of legacy-free than x86, and with the ARM64 releases, they're using a binary translation layer to execute the older 32-bit binaries in microcode on the 64-bit CPUs. In addition, Amiga would do better on a dedicated piece of hardware that is both cheap, and cost-effective, x86 isn't that answer. AmigaOS has a new place in the media-centric world - its low resource usage, efficient memory management and user-centric design would make it a perfect small computer OS, being used in either all-in-one computers or small set-top box computers, and ARM excels in those applications. None of the NG Amigas utilise anywhere near the full potential of workstation hardware, and as I hate to admit it, the days of a large howling workstation are numbered. As we speak I've my Nocona workstation for sale, simply because it is too loud and noisy to keep on, my Challenge S is quiet enough for low-end server applications, the Origin does well for high end, my Octane2 and Beaglebone have been doing very well as my main machines for most applications, and where I need a mobile solution, my trusty Nexus 7 does the job. I simply don't really need x86 except for a few things, which I am considering getting a small low-power computer to do the job of instead.
