Thin Clients

So I was playing with my AMD 50x15 again yesterday, and last week was playing with my HP 2533T thin client laptop. And I'm thinking I wonder why they didn't make any ARM thin clients instead of x86.

Then I came across this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Thin-Client-Embedded-Windows-CE-6-0-/300618961402?pt=US_Thin_Clients&hash=item45fe4951fa

Now I know it is a little pricey. But the way I see it, it could be a desktop that is ARM based, that is I could run all my HPC software on it...what'cha think?

Very light on RAM there!

You raise a good question about why they went x86; generally speaking Arm is cheaper to produce than x86. I would guess (only a guess) that it stems from the original Wyse type thin client hardware all being x86, before Microsoft brought out their embedded OS's to act as RDS terminals. Most Wyse and Igel clients seem to be based on x86 which is cheaper to develop software for as you don't need special hardware to test and build platforms on.

ARM has also only really been a serious commercial entity for the last 10 year, x86 has been about since the early 80's.

You could probably run Linux and an older version for Android on that eBay item too; image depending!