I think saying 8 A57 cores at 2ghz is anything close to x86 at 3.5+ghz on 4 cores.

Clock for clock, pipe for pipe (15 stages in A57, 14-19 in Haswell) x86 still wins because of per-instruction operand volume.

Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc.

> Though i wonder how well this chip would perform at 50w. Double the watts, maybe another 1.5ghz, might be viable for a cheap htpc.

As a general rule, power varies with the cube of frequency. 50W will only get about 2.5 GHz.

You mean an ARM machine?

Yes, sorry I meant to type in ARM.

Where are things wrt the rest of the experience? Can I run FF, Gimp, OpenOffice, arbitrary distros? What about Steam?

While support varies, it's pretty common for Linux programs to be written with an eye to portability. It's really up to the distro to package things up nicely. Most distros that decide to support ARM have many packages in the repos, just as easy to install as x86. You can search here for packages in the ARM port of Archlinux http://archlinuxarm.org/packages Here's a list of ARM packages from Debian http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/armel/