Fair enough.
If I was ED I'd appreciate two things associated with that. First would be any insights the community has on _the_ person to contact about that at Intel given the general line doesn't always yield the best results, and we're talking about a harder sell then most seem to want to admit. Second would involve the package maintainers, like yourself, giving an assessment of what we're really looking at in terms of adapting the software ecosystem, what would actually be lost, and how big of a hit we're looking at with such an effort. He is overworked making little boxes of wonder in addition to the work that puts food on his table after all, and not exactly in the position to have all the time in the world to check on these things himself.
At this point the issue seems to be less one of finding the best SoC, and more one of getting a foot in the door to be able to get hands on a reasonably modern SoC that has significant benefits versus the current OMAP3 without issues with support or other complications that will make it a decision that is regretted later.
Personally I'm of the opinion that processing power isn't as much an issue as improvements in terms of unit cost without loss of capability, given price remains a barrier even for those sold on the concept. Even if the most ideal view of the potential increase in procesinng power is taken, I question how much additional capability in practice we're really looking at versus OMAP3 or between the different options that involve modern designs. LibreOffice runs as do most programs practical to use on a handheld already, and the the jump is not enough to generation leap the emulated consoles. Mainly it would seem that DOS and Windows games would see a jump in their compatibility list, and the processor wouldn't have to work as hard to handle the existing loads.
So again, real-life benchmarks are still missing.
To the extent we have them, read Anandtech, the
Apple A7 SoC in the iPhone 5S is highly competitive with or tends to beat
Intel's Z3770 in a 10" tablet despite the Apple A7 having half the cores, being clocked lower, having platform constraints against it given where Anandtech would have appeared to get their reference data that the Z3770 can abuse to exploit Turbo, 28nm versus 22nm process, etc. I don't see a reason to believe there's anything particularly special about Apple's adaptation of the A57 reference design versus what we'll see as the rest of the market shifts that way, and hence the exuberance about Intel seems odd beyond it's that time in the cycle again.
It's noteworthy that what seems to be being put out there for the Z3770 is focusing on the high usage profile where it would be comparing with the Cortex A57/A15 derivative, and ignores the Cortex A53/A7 part of the equation which fits with how I'd expect them to play things to and fits my predictions regarding a deep sleep state/race to execute strategy. The thing is the Cortex A53/A7 parts play right into where a lot of Pandora loads actually operate.
I'd also note that unless I'm reading
this wrong Turbo on the Baytrail can spike up to 90 degree's Celsius. Probably going to want a heat spreader to help avoid potential for warping the plastic if you wanted to use one in the Pandora. Based on that it looks like it does have a lot of nice features, but at the very a a wireless chip will be needed beyond it.
