Just thought I would begin a new thread to discuss what the pros and cons of each architecture for possible ports of a future 2nd generation MorphOS.

I know that the team has announced, or given hints that the choice has already been made to use x64 architecture, and I don't want to create a divide in the community, but the more I think about a future version of MorphOS, and how it could grow and succeed, the more I question the choice, and wonder if ARM might not be better choice for many reasons.

I'll suggest just a very few Pro's to support why I feel this way, and let more knowledgeable people add their thoughts and opinions, to support my thinking, or to explain the Con's, and why they outweigh the Pro's for porting to ARM.

Here are a few obvious Pro's

1. Low power consumption, making the creation of laptops and tablets easier.
2. Low cost and wide spread use around the world
3. Lack of any single OS currently dominating the market on ARM devices, gives MorphOS greater opportunity to appeal to new users, if/when we grow our developer base and port or create enough MorphOS for ARM applications/programs.
4. Powerful enough to run almost all currently available programs Natively ported to MorphOS, and if the next generation of MorphOS is going to include multi-core support, something as simple and cheap as the Raspberry Pi 3B should be able to match or surpass any of our current single core results running on a G5 Mac (I'm guessing on this, but think I have seen such statements made by others on this forum before).
5. Some members here have mentioned that ARM (or some) CPU's can run big endian and small endian code (if I understood what they were writing), so maybe that is some advantage when porting some of our existing MorphOS PPC programs to the new MorphOS NG?

Some obvious Con's

1. The MorphOS Dev. Team are mostly, or all "Power Users", who create MorphOS for themselves in their free time, so naturally, they want to use a powerful, fast system, which will compile their code in minutes, not hours, (or days, like the original Amiga 68000@7mhz).
2. The lack of currently available full laptop and desktop systems using high performance ARM CPU's, to easily port MorphOS NG to. As we know from past experience, the Team does not port to non-existent products/platforms.

I'm sure other members here will point out many other Con's, so I will stop with just the two obvious ones I know of above.

If you think this discussion is just a waste of time, then ignore this thread. There might be some members who have interesting ideas to add here, and I'm interested in reading them, even if it has no effect, or change of outcome in our direction.