It would also be a very bad move for Raspberry to get involved with a company like Intel, and get themselves stuck with a historically abusive partner, that often tells you it's their way or the highway, like they did when they forced OEM's to buy their CPUs integrated with their GPUs, even if the OEMs already wanted to buy discrete GPUs. They're in a much better position picking a chip maker out of the dozen or so ARM chip makers.
I agree they should upgrade their chips, though, and maybe even have higher-end ones. Even now there are $200 ARM boards, which is what one that is 10-15x more powerful than Raspberry Pi would cost right now. However, I'd rather they don't split the architecture support by software vendors in 3: ARMv6(currently), ARMv7, and ARM8. I think they'd be better off just waiting it out until they are ready for ARMv8.
Recent smartphone processors have since about doubled their clock speed and quadrupled the processor count. Even half that would bring response times below a second, which would be much appreciated.
I have two odroid U2 that I use for testing distributed and multithreaded code. One odroid core (exynos 4412 @1.7GHz ) is more than 8x as fast as the pi, for some numerical simulation code (ODEs). Storage is eMMC, so should be faster than the class 10 SD card in a Pi. It was very easy to get Linaro set up on them (for headless use, as compute servers). Recommend highly.
I use my two RPi for file serving, backups via rsync and btsync, limited web (one is at a remote location).
There's a utilite pro on order as well, but they are a bit backlogged, as I understand it. I'm looking forward to the 2x Gb eth (odroid is 100Mb) and faster bus and disk speeds.
http://linuxgizmos.com http://www.cnx-software.com http://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc http://www.fanlesstech.com
What I'm saying is that you could implement the equivalent of OwnCloud and CalendarServer on the Pi knowing that it needed to be memory and CPU efficient, and no doubt get 300 - 500mS responses. But that would mean not using frameworks that start by assuming you have at least 1GB of memory free and can run an interpreter (PHP) on an interpreter (JS) on the actual code.
Looking at the code for these I think the biggest issue is memory for them. A 2G Pi would probably do what you needed, trying to swap on the Pi (especially if you do that to an SD card) makes it really really slow. Its better if you can swap to an NFS mounted file system, and even cooler if you can swap to a custom memory instance in another server :-)
SI units are not capitalized unless they are someone's name, such as Pascal (pressure) or Newton (force) etc.
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100726071250/xkcd/im...
Personally, I think they should wait until they can make a dual-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 with 1 GB of RAM for $25, which may be possible by 2015, and maybe a quad-core 1.5 Ghz Cortex A53 one with 2 GB of RAM (and perhaps a few extra stuff), for under $50 (I would make it for $40-$45 so the total cost with shipping and whatnot still remains under $50 for most people, instead of going over that price point). A single core Cortex A53 at 1.5 Ghz (its stock clock speed) would be ~5x faster, and also 64-bit. By the way, Cortex A7 and Cortex A53 are both the true successors of the ARM11 CPU RPi is using, and they serve the same markets.
The $25-$50 market, is still probably their best market, since a lot more companies compete at the $100-$200 level.
They are in a great position for volume, so should be able to do better than the current choice that was suboptimal in so may ways. Not clear that the 64 bit stuff will be that cheap soon (plus porting code will take a while) but it depends when they are going to do something. Cheap is important.
My conclusion: The Raspi is slow for serving with dynamic languages. Compiled stuff is fine.
That probably doesn't matter too much if you are building some embedded thing, but I am mostly using my Pi as a web server, and I like that is so easy to set up and configure.
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu
I own 1 rpi and 2 BBBs and all work just fine. I have the rpi 24/24h connected to a relay board and other things but tend to prefer the BBB due to the better CPU and easier to keep up to date with regular distros.
I got Debian Wheezy booting off of the Black in under an hour or so. Sorry to hear you had difficulty getting it to work on yours.
Relatively easy to get a server going on it, and lxde running as a GUI isn't too shabby (noticeably better than a GUI on the PI).
Only trouble with BBB is the lack of hardware accelerated graphics support (BBB has a graphics chip, but it's not working in any of the current kernels)
Not to be off topic, I have three Pi-B's doing local file storage, media center and on a robot platform. The ecosystem around the Pi is one of the best. A quick search will find someone doing something like your idea.
http://www.romaco.ca/blog/2013/07/05/the-cubieboard2-the-mos...