The anatomy of a powerful desktop with an ARM chip

When he was growing up, a dream of Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds was to acquire the Acorn Archimedes, a groundbreaking personal computer with the first ARM RISC chips.

But in 1987, Archimedes wasn't available to Torvalds in Finland, so he settled for the Sinclair QL. In the meanwhile, the Archimedes failed and disappeared from the scene, killing any chance for ARM chips to dominate PCs.

Since then, multiple attempts to put ARM chips in PCs have failed. Outside of a few Chromebooks, most PCs have x86 chips from Intel or AMD.

The domination of x86 is a problem for Linaro, an industry organization that advocates ARM hardware and software. Many of its developers use x86 PCs to compile programs for ARM hardware. That's much like trying to write Windows programs on a Mac.

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