Geode based platforms are fine if your making some sort of pizza box type router thing but generally they lack a lot of the peripheral IO, both variety and quan

Geode based platforms are fine if your making some sort of pizza box type router thing but generally they lack a lot of the peripheral IO, both variety and quantity, that an ARM SOC board would have like i2c, spi, rs232, etc... Geode boards are also a order of magnitude larger than things like the Beagle board or the Gumstix (www.gumstix.com). The major inhibitor to using these arm platforms isn't the compiler it's that there aren't any low cost dev boards which are a practical size that you could also use in a prototype, w/o getting a hardware engineer to make a custom board layout for you. That's why I find things like this exciting. At least in my opinion.