What would convince me to use Fedora ARM?
An ARM Laptop with specs approximately on par with a Macbook Pro.
Don't fall for the "race to the bottom" and produce an ARM Netbook w/9-inch screen. That's been done already.
An ARM Laptop with specs approximately on par with a Macbook Pro.
Don't fall for the "race to the bottom" and produce an ARM Netbook w/9-inch screen. That's been done already.
Newer e-ink type screens are better than the older ones about reducing the "flashing" between screen draws (to avoid ghosting) but they still need to do it every once in a while (I believe new Kindle does it every 6 page turns).
MacBook Air 11.6 - 35 WHr battery and 5 hours of Wifi Usage at 7 W [1] New iPad - 42.5 WHr battery and 10 hours of Wifi Usage at 4.25 W [2]
e-ink screen may make that last far longer... but if you've spent any time trying to use the e-ink Kindle browser, you'll quickly realize that the lack of fast refresh rate is a very difficult problem to solve in terms of usable UI.
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html [2] http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
I'll bite: nothing. In fact, only disadvantages abound. You won't get i5 or i7 like performance at the same value or wattage from an ARM for a few more years.
A low-end ARM doesn't worry about heat because it's "underpowered" (loosely speaking). But if you want to approach the performance of an i5, the natural side effects will be tons of heat, much, much worse battery life, and even then, only mediocre performance.
There's a lot more to a CPU than RISC vs CISC. Intel has put decades of research into chip design and various instruction-level optimizations that take place within the CPU. You're making a big mistake assuming ARM can just directly scale their smartphone/tablet CPUs to the multi-core behemoths that are today's Sandy Bridge and tomorrow's Ivy Bridge. It just doesn't work that way - look at AMD.
At the end of the day and at this point in time, ARM entering the high-performance desktop sector would be as poorly executed as Intel's foray into the low-energy CPU segment with Atom... except it would suck more.