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why cant it be a desktop ? high def video isnt a requirement, but would be nice incase someone does find some high def video. and i think high def displays are becoming the norm for the desktop.
There is a new ARM chip coming from Freescale, the i.MX53.
We're well ahead of you :)
There is no reason you can't use the Efika MX as a desktop except for the IPU pixel clock limitation - the IPU bus can only run at 133MHz therefore you can only drive displays up to 133MHz. In practice this means 1440x900 is easy, 1680x1050 is attainable (on most monitors) but 1920x1080 is right out of the window of acceptable rates (you'd need 148MHz for the standards compliant mode).
The iMX53 has a 150MHz IPU bus, so solved. In the meantime the iMX51 is more than capable. Also, decoding 1080p video is not really a great big deal on most chips like this. For instance, the decoder on the Marvell cores, or the one built into the latest Intel Atom cores (which is somewhat GPU based as I understand) decode up to 1080p video, but they've never been paired with a display bigger than 1280x800 on a portable device :)
Being ABLE to decode it is nice, having a use for all that power is really the point. 1080p video decoding comes in handy for media centers but not for desktops. Most people are happy with 720p video on a small monitor (less than 26 inches), a lot of TVs still ship at 1366x768 or 1600x900 (some 50" Plasma..) which means you are not seeing all 1080 lines nor are you seeing the full benefit of that video resolution as it has to be resized to fit the screen (standard airline seat adage!)
As for the comment about "only 30fps", you need to evaluate how much 60fps 1080p video there actually is out there. I'll give you a clue: there isn't any worth watching. Sony only added this to their Blu-Ray specs a while back, most HDMI connections don't support it (you need HDMI 1.4a or so, 99.9% of systems shipped in the world only support HDMI 1.3) - and this is again a pixel clock issue. There is nothing in the world that will make movie producers have their movie not play on the half a billion installed HD movie playback units just so they can say it's "60fps" - most 60fps TVs are that because they upsample interlaced video to progressive.
The industry standard for video playback is still 24fps, 25fps in Europe/Australia and parts of South America, and 29.97fps in the US and Japan and the rest of the NTSC world, regardless of how good your TV is.
At some point you have to scale back your expectations to meet reality, and not just play the numbers game.