Re: ARM is not very popular as desktop
Since Conroe I have expected PCs to last forever. Builds have grown big enough that it's nice on a software-development workstation to have 2GB per thread and ideal to have 4GB per thread, but that's been possible since Haswell.
A problem is that memory controller IP, which is very black magic and comes from a very small number of suppliers, charges a big premium for each extra address line; so it would be a significant extra expense to make a phone or set-top-box SoC which happens to be able to support 16GB, and therefore you're not going to be able to make a nice 16GB devboard around a ubiquitous SoC.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
