Ok this might be far future but it would be interesting to know the developers view on Ardour ARM ports and touch interface capability.
There is some work that would have to be done.
First and foremost Jack would need to run on it, so you would have to look at porting Jack to ARM. Since ARM platforms are typically fixed point and do horribly on floating point, this is in general not a good idea, however there have been a couple of platforms recently that handled floating point as well on the DSP, but again you would have to do some porting work to get that running correctly, but it is my understanding that it is technically feasible.
After that you would have to rewrite all of Ardour’s custom written SSE instructions and similar to something that would work in ARM, or disable them all together. Primarily, if I remember correctly, this affects metering more than anything, however that doesn’t speak for any plugins that may or may not use assembly instructions so it might be a bit limited to use Ardour without plugins.
So this all begs the question, what exactly do you see this being a benefit for?
SeabladeThe main reasons probably the proliferation and affordability of ARM based devices.
So many distro’s is starting to support Arm. (Many households might only have ARM based computers in a few years)
New developments in multicore and 64bit arm processors mean that ARM will be powerful enough.
Affordability: Low prices of Arm processors Tegra 3 and Omap 5 processors is going for between $12-$25
But x86 is also making much progress in price and power consumption so the need is unclear.