>So yes ARM is great. But let's be honest, Intel is vastly, vastly ahead when it comes to anything that is not a toy.
Well, I agree if you're using "toy" as Romans used "Barbarian". If you mean by "toy" anything that's not desktop, then yes.
But if you look at what happens in an industrial setting and do a teardown on those tools (oil industry, for example), you won't find Intel processors, you'll find FPGAs and ARM processors in a bunch of tiny toys that cost about 75k each.
So it appears that "toy" is not what the device is destined to be, but what the people who buy it end up using it for.
As with any programming language, you can print "Hello world" and leave it at that, or you can build a massive thing.
The limits of imagination are unfortunately reached way before the hardware limitations are.
Yes the RPi is a fantastic device and I am building a small minimilastic hardware terminal for financial visualization around it which will be dirt cheap and surprisingly powerful, mainly because its graphics are actually really fast enough for 3d vector viz. I was just pointing out that there is a lot of "arm is taking over" commentary out there and that needs to take into account the performance differential, which is still enormous.
Correct me if I'm wrong if I assume you use the word "mobile" to mean "something that's portable" and not in a "mobile phone" way..
If this is the case, then the example I gave was about oil services companies using such devices in their 'tools'.
These tools are used to do things like Reservoir Characterization (is there oil? How much? How easily can it be extracted? What does it look like inside? At what depths?).
It's such a shame they don't really communicate a lot because they do some really, really cool stuff. The featured company is known as "The biggest company you've never heard of" (3 x the size of Halliburton, 80+ countries, etc).
Also, the automotive industry uses a lot of stuff with ARM architecture (from Atmel, Altera, etc).. I know I've seen in ECUs (Electronic Control Units). These things control the vehicle (injection, etc).
They're also used in PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) -Stuxnet targeted Siemens PLCs, for example of what the things are-.
And let alone the stuff you find in air conditionners, alarm systems wether for home or cars, elevators, other types of machinery, etc..
Well, I agree if you're using "toy" as Romans used "Barbarian". If you mean by "toy" anything that's not desktop, then yes.
But if you look at what happens in an industrial setting and do a teardown on those tools (oil industry, for example), you won't find Intel processors, you'll find FPGAs and ARM processors in a bunch of tiny toys that cost about 75k each.
So it appears that "toy" is not what the device is destined to be, but what the people who buy it end up using it for.
As with any programming language, you can print "Hello world" and leave it at that, or you can build a massive thing.
The limits of imagination are unfortunately reached way before the hardware limitations are.