> I own both incarnations of Efika MX (both the smarttop and the smartbook).
> [...] HW wise they are running any Sam 440 into the ground

Just to illustrate what that statement means specifically, let me put this link to a benchmark comparison here:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7675&start=164

I know that the poor floating point result of the Efika MX was due to softfloat being used. Now that "the Linux that Genesi provides with the Efika MX really supports the HW", would you please run the nbench benchmark on your Efika MX with hardfloat enabled, so the comparison becomes more fair?

> Today's fastest ARM CPU's kicks any old PPC based desktop/laptop's butt

Today's fastest ARM CPUs are still slower than the PPC970 CPUs in most (i.e. 2.0+ GHz) G5 desktop machines. Geekbench example:

Dual-core 2.5 GHz PowerMac G5: 2366 points
Quad-core 1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A9: 1811 points
Dual-core 1.3 GHz Apple A6: 1572 points
Dual-core 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Krait: 1540 points
Dual-core 1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A9: 1229 points

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/622225
http://browser.primatelabs.com/android-benchmarks
http://browser.primatelabs.com/ios-benchmarks

> we have yet to see the peak of Cortex A9 generation of CPU's

The world is already turning to Cortex-A15 performance generation of ARM CPUs with the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 (Krait core) and just recently the Apple A6 (custom core). I know that there're vendors behind the curve with their first Cortex-A9 chips still to come to mass market (like Freescale with i.MX6), but I doubt somewhat that they will be able to beat current Cortex-A9 chips in performance.


Edit: corrected A6 clock rate.

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 08.10.2012 - 21:54 ]