Well actually the beauty of this is that we are not dependent on this board. This is a simple development board based on a ARM A8 CPU. THis is pretty standard CPU with ARM architecture that you'll find on any cellphone, embedded system, tablet, etc. ARM CPUs and development boards are here at many years and will stay for many years to come. They are a goto CPU for these applications, due to their capacity and lower consumption.
The development board is also a good idea because you have lots of I/O that you can interconnect with your special purpose logic. This is what they are made for, so you can test and develop your hardware applications.
Actually my idea was that we could start with this type of solution since we have a base already made at a very low price and in the future if we feel the need we can build our own board based on a ARM CPU. There are few frameworks that you can use to select the components and functions and that will design a board for you. With the small form factor, ethernet, usb support, we can take it everywhere and plug it on any SSL if we like to and work through our laptop, desktop or tablet.
Working on a PC directly i think it's not a viable option since you'd have to develop a PCI card, which is more complex and PCI on a slot is getting deprecated to thunderbolt. You wouldn't be able to take it with you and connect it to your laptop/table. We could use the USB port on the development board to connect to the PC/Laptop, but I think that if we use the ethernet port and IP protocol we would be opening our possibilities placing the console connected to the network. For instance, we could connect several clients to the SSLMixed computer imagine this cenario:
* main client on the laptop where you control the console working, monitor its status (VCA, channel strips), take snapshots and build the automation.
* one ipad client that can monitor the console faders and interact with it at the same time has the main client
* one client can have the automation vew exported to his screen
And the most interesting is that then can all theoretically be on the other side of the planet!
THese are some ideas that I think are really modern and thinking ahead. All of these are possible and done everyday on other applications.
I hope to have catched your interest to this vision.
Cheers,
Artur