ARM PC/HTPCs are getting interesting! (Via's APC (Android PC) announced).

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 01:44:28PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> It would be nice if the product looked to be part of a continuing
>> series.  Eventually, any box will be obsolete.
>
> Potentially a problem, but that is true of all computers.

What is irritating with the typical ARM system vendors is that they
seem to set up designs as a one-shot, "that's what it'll always be"
thing.

In the embedded space, that's certainly a tempting thing to do, as
embedded integrators don't want to be changing specs of hardware much,
that's mighty painful to do.

But it tends to lead to vendors holding to one model for much longer
than they ought to, until long after betternewerfaster stuff has
overshadowed it.

It is encouraging to me that VIA is doing this; they have been in the
habit of designing motherboards and chipsets that have fairly frequent
refresh cycles for their designs; it seems less likely that they will
fall into that trap.

>> - I'd like USB3 so that disk access can be fast.  eSATA would be good
>>   now but I imagine that USB3 will displace it and is more versatile.
>
> I don't think so.  SATA is the native interface of the harddisk.  I don't
> think you will ever see a harddisk with native USB3.  External enclosures
> sure.  It is much more complex to implement USB handshaking and boot
> than SATA is.  SATA isn't going anywhere.

Agreed.

>> - to give the device more flexibility and longevity, I'd like a lot of
>>   RAM.  These days, in the PC world, 4G is $20 retail -- well worth it.
>
> Well ARM being 32bit (still) you are not going to see 4GB+ ram on one.
> This is changing of course but it will be a few more years.  64bit ARM
> is coming, as is 32bit ARM with PAE like support for extra ram.

A bit sad...  At least 2GB is a pretty material amount of memory.
Mobile phones commonly don't have that much :-)
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists