I’d really love to get away from Intel some day. But it always boils down to two things:
- GPU with free drivers and no firmware blobs needed - this ARM CPU is a nice compute horse but has no GPU so you would need to add a PCIe graphics card and there choices for GPUs without proprietary drivers and/or firmware blobs are close to zero - and it add to:
- price - the HoneyComb LX2K board alone costs $750 which gives you a pretty good idea what the hw cost is - plus case, power supply etc. etc. this will become pretty expensive quickly, more than most people would be willing to pay for such a type of Mini workstation
Apple shows that it is possible to make workstation class ARM based CPUs which are at least up to par or even better than comparable Intel CPUs. But sadly this kind of CPU is not so easily available on the free market for companies like us to use. And the few that are in a similar ballpark region concerning CPU and GPU performance are not usable for us due to tons of proprietary bits and pieces - which will BTW also apply to the Apple ARM CPUs, which Apple of course does not care about, but we do.
Cheers
nicole