I think the cold truth is that if they did, the non-x86 system would cost almost as much as an x86 system, and would perform worse. When you add more ports, connectors, RAM sockets, CPU socket etc., the cost of the CPU starts to becomes relatively unimportant. A cheap x86 Celeron, which is as fast, if not faster, than an ARM CPU, will only add a small percentage to your budget. And even a decent i3 won't cost that much more either, percentage-wise.
This why we only see Raspberry Pi-esque devices, I believe. ARM CPUs excel in the embedded space, which is not surprising since this is where they grew up. Their qualities are low cost and low absolute power usage (as opposed to performance per watt). This doesn't make sense for desktop systems.
There were times, when such a system might have outperformed x86 hardware (Sparc, Power). And even if not strictly competetive, people who care about writing low level software should be delighted working on something different than x86. I certainly would like to work on an Arm64 system, ideally with 8+ cores. That should be quite interesting.
May well be. I can't shake the feel that all performance we have gotten have been from smaller chip features allowing for more more heat headroom, and thus more "waste" via out-of-order, all branches at once, massive caches, etc etc etc. And once we hit the brick wall that is electron leakage, RISC or CISC will mean crap all for performance pr watt.
Never mind that in recent years both AMD and Intel has taken their offerings into the real of SoCs. AMD have largely lead the way, by moving more and more of what used to be the northbridge onto the CPU die.
The only thing keeping both out of the mobile world seems to be price pr unit. Intel bled money to get Asian OEMs to use their mobile ATOMs rather than Chinese ARM based SoCs.
There are several single-board computers with various permutations of USB 3.0, GbE, SATA, mSATA, miniPCIe, etc.
Check out the ODroid series, Banana Pi Pro, ECS Liva, Jetson TK-1, etc.
While I have to acknowledge the RPi's pioneering contributions to the ultra-cheap SBC market, I find it immensely frustrating that it sucks up all of the oxygen on this topic. There are many, many other options at this point and many of them are better choices for the typical "mini Linux server" or "low-power desktop system" use-case.
Depends on your use case. I believe the Banana Pi Pro is supported by Debian Jessie with the stock kernel if you can do without video and audio out and a handful of other features you're unlikely to need in a headless server. See http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort - Banana Pi /Pro is A20, Jessie ships Linux 3.16. (Audio and unaccelerated graphics are supported by newer mainline kernels, in theory at least.)
This why we only see Raspberry Pi-esque devices, I believe. ARM CPUs excel in the embedded space, which is not surprising since this is where they grew up. Their qualities are low cost and low absolute power usage (as opposed to performance per watt). This doesn't make sense for desktop systems.