One problem is that at the low end we have R-Pis and competitors, all sub $100 for the boards. At the higher end of that we have Rockchip RK3399 boards which tend to be in the $80 to $120 range depending on RAM, eMMC and wifi capabilities. All of these are built on older Arm cores - the RK3399 has A72 cores which are a good few years old now!
There's then a big jump to get boards with higher spec cores, and most of those for "professional" users as "board support packages" for businesses developing phones or tables, and cost many many hundreds of $$, far from affordable. You can look on 96boards and you'll find the Kirin 970 (Arm A73) at roughly $300. I couldn't find anything there with newer Cortex cores.
Then you have the problem that Arm don't have good linux support for their GPUs, usually a binary blob, and little or no 3D acceleration. AFAICT people end up using kernels and drivers from Android builds and then bodging a linux desktop on top of that.
Gigabyte have a cavium thunderx workstation, but for that price you can buy a pretty decent Intel laptop! The Socionext dev/workstation is over $1000.
So, really, it seems to me that Arm don't care about anything other than Android or small embedded devices, maybe they care a bit about Windows (with the new replacement of Windows-RT) but I wonder who's doing all the work on the GPU side to make Windows run on it? If Arm cared, they would be actively supporting native development on Arm-based workstations.
Apple are really doing their own thing, their processors closely resemble Arm processors when seen as a black box, but AFAICT their bionic processors (which are really good!) are completely custom design. I hope that they do release affordable devices like Mac Minis with Bionic processors, and they don't lock them down, so they can be re-purposed for other operating systems!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
