Hell i was working on trying to build a Xscale based laptop with their high end chips (the ones that clock over 1Ghz and have mini processors like the CELL (hah IBM wasn't the first)) however Intel refuses to deal in low volumes, thats why the video card hack looks like it might be imposible .
this means that unless you have the support of programmers (for apps) you would never see something like this, your average user would want something running windows which won't run on ARM processors or windows CE which wont run on ARM cpu' s (its a joke )
however if you found one i would buy it. at the moment i have found an Xscale based design that takes SODIMMS (laptop memory) supports 4 SATA drives, has minipci and is dual core @ 733Mhz, however i would hate to see the price plus the cost of making a case for it.
that said i plan to by some to use as my next computer, i don’t care about speed, all i need is links, lynks of w3m and i would be happy. beats cross compiling
now for the clarifications (from an computer engineering student)
Clock for Clock, the P4 wins hands down by about 2 times the performance in syinthetic benchmarks (eg bogomips)
Clock/power vs Clock/power the ARM pulls away, i can't give you exact numbers however if i had an allocation of power (say 80watt like a p4) and used that to build a multi cpu Xscale machine i know the performance of the arms would be far in advance of the p4, hell that machine i talked about earlier only runs at 12 watt (for dual cpu) so 80W/12W = 6.6 boards, lets take 6 then, times that by 2 to represent total amount of cpu's and you get a 12 cpu machine with each core at 733Mhz that can each address up to 2GB of ram each
the design of the CPU is much cleaner, for example each instruction is conditional not just branches allowing you to do a
if x !=0
{
x++
}
in one instruction, dosent mean much to you guys but lets just say that it can give you a very nice speed boost.
