It is interesting to see what people are comparing to the "An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. Take a byte!" to these days.
This article is talking about a $99 dollar supercomputer that has 16 cores @ 700MHz each.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/28/09/2012/54676/raspberry-pi-gets-a-competitor.htm
This article is about an ARM board, not that different to the Raspberry Pi but with more power and RAM.
a Raspbian port is almost running on the APC board
See, I just don't get this. If as suggested in the forum posts John linked to the CPU architecture is the same then there's no 'port' to do. All you really need is to compile a kernel with the right drivers and deal with any booting differences.
I took an Arch for RPi image and got it to run on an iMX53 QSB by doing exactly that. No porting required, the only things I compiled were the kernel and uBoot. As the MX53 is a CortexA8 it's not even a fair comparison as it's a different architecture variant.
The other assumption from that thread that stuff won't work because it's never thought of anything other than x86 is also rather misleading. Most of the OSS stuff has had groups like debian and redhat compiling it across x86, x86_64, Arm, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, both big endian and little endian for many years.
Sure there can still be issues, but likely most of them have already been found and fixed for what you'll find in Debian (which is a lot). All those DSL routers, Access points, Android devices go a long way to showing what's already been done.
Now the GPU is a different story, but when it's essentially 'no driver' vs 'no driver' there's little or nothing to argue over 
a Raspbian port is almost running on the APC board
See, I just don't get this. If as suggested in the forum posts John linked to the CPU architecture is the same then there's no 'port' to do. All you really need is to compile a kernel with the right drivers and deal with any booting differences.
I took an Arch for RPi image and got it to run on an iMX53 QSB by doing exactly that. No porting required, the only things I compiled were the kernel and uBoot. As the MX53 is a CortexA8 it's not even a fair comparison as it's a different architecture variant.
The other assumption from that thread that stuff won't work because it's never thought of anything other than x86 is also rather misleading. Most of the OSS stuff has had groups like debian and redhat compiling it across x86, x86_64, Arm, Mips, Sparc, PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, both big endian and little endian for many years.
Sure there can still be issues, but likely most of them have already been found and fixed for what you'll find in Debian (which is a lot). All those DSL routers, Access points, Android devices go a long way to showing what's already been done.
Now the GPU is a different story, but when it's essentially 'no driver' vs 'no driver' there's little or nothing to argue over
